Council has scrapped its policy of routinely approving extra property tax hikes if the province doesn’t raise property taxes by as much as Calgary had planned to.

The city may still deliver the same sort of double-digit tax hikes that it has in recent years, but they won’t be an “automatic” decision, as they had been in recent years.

By a 14-1 vote, members approved Coun. Shane Keating’s proposal Monday to end the policy. Councillors, however, rejected his idea for a new way to determine whether or not council needs the extra money to fill the so-called “tax room.”

“In my view, if we’re going to take it, we must start with identifying a very solid and desperate need rather than just a want or a nice-to-have. And we’ve never really had that solid debate,” Keating said.

The decision doesn’t undo the $52-million “tax room” hike council approved this year, but could affect councillors’ votes to use the same manoeuvre in future years.

Keating’s idea won support from both critics and supporters of the past tax hikes. Coun. Brian Pincott and Mayor Naheed Nenshi both endorsed the idea of devising a clear plan for the added property tax revenue before deciding to raise it.

In doing so, Nenshi criticized his own idea from this spring to consult Calgarians on how the money should be used — public engagement that included a reality-show-inspired public debate, and was ultimately ignored when June’s flood reordered civic priorities.

“We tried something new, and that wasn’t a very good process either,” he said before council’s debate.

He also cast doubt on how automatic the decision-making is. “Council ends up having the debate every time anyway, so that policy to automatically take it actually has no impact.”

Only Coun. Druh Farrell voted to keep the policy.

City manager Owen Tobert, a Calgary bureaucrat for three decades, doesn’t recall council raising its own civic taxes to occupy tax room before the Dave Bronconnier administration last decade. Council didn’t use the revenue-generating manoeuvre in the former mayor’s final four years (2007 through 2010), but did approve the extra property tax hikes for businesses or in each of Nenshi’s first three years.

This year, council approved a 5.1 per cent civic tax hike, but bumped it up to 13 per cent to offset an effective decrease in provincial property taxes — creating a 5.1 per cent blended rate. This year, they’re spending the extra “tax room” dollars on flood recovery, but have committed other years’ increases to libraries, recreation centres and sidewalk repairs.

Doing this has changed the balance between civic and provincial property taxes to 60-40, from 50-50 about five years ago, city staff told council.

jmarkusoff@calgaryherald.com