Cambridge city council will be formally requesting the upper levels of government provide more help to municipalities by giving them a share of taxes from property sales.
Tuesday evening’s council meeting saw council unanimously support a motion brought forward by Coun. Nicholas Ermeta which asked the province to provide municipalities with a share of land transfer taxes collected on property sales and the feds to do the same with GST collected similarly.
Ermeta explained at the meeting the motion was originally passed by the Town of Aurora and he felt it was timely when it came through as correspondence.
“The needs of our community are growing and the revenue is not keeping up with that,” Ermeta said.”There’s also been services that have been downloaded to municipalities over the years as well and I think that this is timely because the municipal level of government has the greatest responsibility but the least revenue sources.”
He stressed this wouldn’t be an increase in taxes—and municipalities should continue to find efficiencies—but a better use of funding that is already there, arguing the current funding model is outdated.
“Municipalities need help,” Ermeta said.
Coun. Adam Cooper, the seconder on the motion, said municipalities need to band together to lobby the province for more funding.
“As far as we’ve seen we get to budget time we struggle to not remove services, to delay needed projects,” Cooper said.
“Sometimes we do feel like we’re on our own. I think that could provide a huge relief to the taxpayers. So I hope, as we’ve done here, that some other municipalities pick up on this and maybe the province will help us.”
