To the Editor,
Re: Revitalization of downtown keeps taking tax dolllars, Letters, Feb. 10.
Neil Saunders calls downtown revitalization “a bloodsucking scheme on the taxpayers’ backs”. This is a curious idea – and well separated from the truth.
Downtown businesses, like all businesses in Nanaimo, pay some of the highest property tax rates in the province, many times higher than the rates paid on residential property. Downtown business people – your neighbours – pay these high property taxes to offset and support the services used by all of us, for recreation, for parks, for new roads, for police services.
Downtown businesses pay these high property taxes in spite of the fact that downtowns themselves are very efficient users of municipal services – they are compact, they are vibrant, and they are adaptable.
And here’s the rub: we pay these high taxes for roads and utilities that have actually already been paid for, over many decades, and many times over.
The result is that taxes paid by downtown businesses are often used to offset the costs of running a sprawling city – to build new roads and sewers.
All good, except that too frequently these new roads and sewers service brand new business and industrial areas opened up by this council and many that have preceded it – in spite of the fact that downtown has chronically high vacancy rates and little incentive for reinvestment.
Or maybe Saunders is complaining about the downtown revitalization funds generated by the Downtown Nanaimo Business Improvement Association? Perhaps he does not understand that these BIA funds are a special tax paid exclusively by downtown businesses to support co-operative efforts in developing and promoting Nanaimo’s downtown. Investments, which when coupled with countless volunteer hours, have helped to provide many of the festivals and events that all of Nanaimo enjoys.
I am a downtown business owner, and a taxpayer, and I am not asking for anything from Neil Saunders – other than that he take the time to get his facts straight.
Doug Backhouse
Nanaimo
