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Council's finance committee is back in session. First up, potential solutions to the downtown tax shift.



Check out this chart, downtown office square footage continues to climb while demand has gone off a cliff: #yyccc #yyc pic.twitter.com/Sk0cGQViHf — Meghan Potkins (@mpotkins) March 5, 2019

The city has approximately $70 million to spend on tax relief measures and council is expected to vote on potential options at its next meeting March 18.

“Every single member of council understands that we have to support small business in this community,” Nenshi said Tuesday. “We have gotten into a situation where some businesses in the city are seeing a lot of potential damage and that’s not right and it’s not fair. We’ve had their back for the last two years and we’ll continue to have their back.”

The city estimates that lost property taxes from the downtown amount to more than $250 million annually. The resulting shortfall has led to a redistribution of the tax burden to non-residential properties outside the core, including industrial areas and the suburbs.

The trend has hit businesses and city finances hard since Calgary has traditionally long relied on a disproportionate amount of revenue from commercial properties. Calgary’s current business-to-residential property tax ratio is 4.47:1 — one of the highest in the country.

The city has previously opted to use one-off cash infusions in 2017 and 2018 to keep a lid on tax hikes with a rebate program for commercial properties, but Nenshi acknowledged Tuesday that council has heard anecdotal evidence that the program isn’t working.

“What we’ve learned is that the program that we’ve used over the last couple of years was not as effective as it should have been,” Nenshi said, pointing out that small-business owners have complained that landlords aren’t passing on the savings to their tenants.