Municipal taxes in Ontario

The Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) has come in for a lot of criticism in Ontario recently. I'm one of the few people in my area who managed to get a rollback in my assessment for the 2003-2004 tax years, so I've had a bit more experience of dealing with MPAC than most people. MPAC is the organization set up to do market value assessments (MVA) of properties and to provide municipalities with that information in order to set tax rates.

MPAC is getting a lot of heat from taxpayers because their assessments are opaque — it's difficult to discover why certain properties are assessed at significantly different values than superficially similar properties in the same area. At our hearing, for example, we discovered that MPAC uses a fairly simple method for establishing the "square footage" of a given building . . . they measure from opposite corners of the ground floor. This didn't sound too bad, until we discovered that our house (which has an attached garage) was being considered to be identical to other houses in our area which have fully detached garages — and the detached garage was not included in the "square footage" of the "comparable" houses. This had the direct effect of artificially boosting the assessed value of our house. However handy this may be for the town, surely this isn't the intent of MVA?

Jon passed along a link to a particularly appropriate Toronto Star cartoon (reg. req'd) on the issue.

Incidentally, our assessment for 2005-2006 shows our house has (theoretically) increased in value by nearly 20% since 2003. So I have to expect at least that much of an increase in my municipal property taxes. Oh, joy. Of course, my pay hasn't risen by even a tenth of that since 2003, but that's my problem.

Update: The link to the Toronto Star has changed, but you can only view it if you're registered on their site.