Olds Mayor Mike Muzychka says he's got a proposal to help ease the pain for local businesses battling tough economic times: creating an entity to look at cutting taxes on a region-wide basis.
Muzychka brought that idea up during an interview with the Albertan. He said town officials are keenly aware of how much the business community is hurting.
"My thinking is I want to take it to our council and get approval — which I haven't done yet — about taking a regional approach and going to a mechanism like MAP, our Municipal Area Partnership, so Didsbury, Carstairs, Sundre, all the mayors and the reeve from the county — and sit down and put a regional strategy together," he said.
He thinks the group could be tasked with looking at whether — or how — taxes could be reduced in order to help businesses survive and hopefully thrive. But he indicated this has to be done one step at a time.
"We're waiting to get a legal opinion on Bill 7 to see exactly how it's going to work, because we've got opinions from ministers and MLAs that conflict with each other," he said.
Muzychka said once they've received a legal opinion on how Bill 7 works, then town officials will be able to "formulate a strategy plan to try and implement it."
Bill 7, the Municipal Government (Property Tax Incentives) Amendment Act, provides municipalities in Alberta with new powers to pass bylaws to further provide tax exemptions, reductions and deferrals.
For example, they can offer tax breaks for up to 15 years to businesses willing to set up in a community.
Muzychka warned that although it's easy for people or businesses to call for tax breaks, they have a real impact, which some may not like, once they become reality.
For example, he said, tax cuts may reduce services like road or sidewalk maintenance or snow removal.
"Even if we are able to do a geographical area that we can reduce taxes, it's still going to affect services across the board," he said. "I don't want to just say, 'hey yeah, let's do it,' and not think about the longterm effects.
"This is an incredibly complex issue that we have to study out considerably more."
Muzychka admitted he got off surprisingly lightly when no one complained directly about taxes during a an Aug. 21 breakfast sponsored by the Town of Olds and the Olds and District Chamber of Commerce, although the economic pain that businesses are feeling was brought up.
"I thought I got away a little bit lucky," he said, although he added, "the temperature in the room seemed to be a little bit cooler than I had hoped."
"My philosophy is to go in with as much positivity as humanly possible and then if the negative aspects get questioned, well then, I'm prepared to answer to them for sure.
"There's some harder questions out there for sure, and I'm prepared to answer them. It's not that I'm trying to skirt them, but at the same time, I thought I'd be asked a little bit more."
During the breakfast meeting, Muzychka announced the creation of an economic development secretariat, consisting of representatives of the Town of Olds, Olds Institute and Olds and District Chamber of Commerce, an idea proposed by chief administrative officer Michael Merritt.
"What it's going to do is it's going to laser-focus our economic development from all three organizations and be able to better serve any requests that come into the town and hopefully land a lot more of these businesses that come and see us," Muzychka said during his address to breakfast-goers.
"We're having people confused when they're knocking on the door. We thought we'd put all the relevant groups together," Muzychka told the Albertan. "Council has supported it beyond belief. I think it's a phenomenal idea."
He said the community's Business Attraction Retention and Expansion committee has been "shelved, but we're looking at whether to revitalize that as well."
Muzychka was asked if that means it could be revived in addition to the secretariat.
"Perhaps. Again, we're not sure where that's going quite yet," he said.
