Municipal taxes: money well spent

(June 16) - We got our property tax bills last week. My final 2009 taxes are $2706. Of this, about $2200 is for city services, and $500 is for the school board. My municipal portion is a bit below the $2600 average. It is hard to find a better bargain.

Compare it, for example, with my Rogers bill. Since January 1 I’ve paid them $935. Over the year that will be $1870, only $330 less than I pay the city. Then there’s another $900 a year to Bell Canada for a land line and $400 to Sentex for an Internet connection. That’s $2200 for municipal services and $2600 for 2 cell phones, one landline, cable TV and an Internet connection.

I could easily pay Rogers a lot more. We have a cell phone each, on what they call a pooled family plan. They’re not Blackberries or anything like that. Just your basic run of the mill phones.

I can call someone, send text messages, keep track of appointments and set a count down timer to beep when it’s time to turn the pork chops on the barbecue. We have the basic cable television package. No digital bells and whistles, no movie channels.

My guess is that I am in the minority in this. Granted, there’s an even smaller minority. Some people live their lives entirely without a cell phone or a television, but I’m not one of them. I like watching Blue Jays games on Sportsnet. I love watching federal cabinet ministers squirm on Newsworld.

I don’t need movies on demand and I don’t want to be part of the 500 channel universe. I don’t need to check e-mail on my cell phone. A lot do, and I bet they shovel a lot more into Rogers’ bank account than I ever will.

The $500 for education is a bargain, even though it’s been six or seven years since my daughter got out of high school. She and her three brothers before her got a darn good public education for –all things considered – next to nothing out of my pocket. Now other people’s kids are getting ready to make the world a better place. And before too long my granddaughter will lift her back pack full of books and trundle off to grade school. All for about the same as I pay for Internet service.

What do I get for my property taxes? Incredible value for money when you think about it. For $286 a year I get 24 hour a day fire protection, every day of the year. Police protection costs me $418. Another $132 gets my garbage collected 52 times a year. That’s $2.50 a week.

For $308 I get to drive on paved roads. Or mostly paved ones. You’re better off walking on Lemon Street between Stuart and Metcalfe. Cars have been known to disappear into pot holes down there.

For $375 we get a lot of social services, mostly administered by the county. A lot of families get some reasonably decent and affordable housing for this money. Not enough, but a lot more than if we didn’t have the opportunity to pay taxes.

A lot of us love to complain about taxes. At other levels of government this is a justifiable activity. The distribution of the burden is very uneven. It hurts to see our income taxes used to promote the sale of asbestos to developing countries, for example.

We have every right to complain when provincial taxes are swallowed by the scandalous behaviour of the people who run eHealth Ontario.

Local taxes, on the other hand, are money well spent.