Yellowknife’s property tax increase is now set to be 6% in 2025

Yellowknife city council has finished going through the 2025 budget and looks set to approve a property tax increase of six percent.

That’s down from an 8.05-percent increase initially proposed in the draft budget last month.

While council did make some changes – like dropping a planned new soccer field and deleting money for a city-owned dog pound – most of the shift from eight to six percent is attributable to the inclusion of new revenue from a carbon tax grant.

The NWT government has just told the city it will receive $629,000 through a relatively new system of grants that shares 10 percent of GNWT carbon tax revenue with municipalities. (What the city pays out in carbon tax each year does not appear as a line item in its latest financial statements and was not immediately clear.)

City staff say they cannot normally include sums like that in the budget. City accounting procedures don’t allow for items that do not possess signed agreements and are therefore considered not 100-percent guaranteed to arrive.

“We are confident that those resources will appear. It’s just we are not, for budgeting purposes, permitted to factor that into this calculation at this time,” city manager Stephen Van Dine said as budget deliberations concluded on Thursday.

City council passed a motion led by Mayor Rebecca Alty to override that rule. Including the $629,000 in the budget had the effect of bringing the tax increase down toward six percent.

Without including the carbon tax grant, the tax increase for 2025 would have been closer to 7.8 percent, barely a shift from 8.05 percent despite three nights of discussion.

“We have done that in the past,” Alty said of council’s vote to override the usual budgeting rules, “with the risk being that we don’t get the money. However, we’ve received the letter, we’re going to get the money in 2025, so it’s basically a no-risk situation.”

On the flip side, the city also said it can’t be sure how the likelihood of increased power rates will affect the budget next year.

“We do have some contingency built into our budget and we hope that will be enough” to cover any rate hike, city corporate services director Kavi Pandoo said.

The budget should be finalized in a formal vote on Monday.

This week’s changes

The only other change of note made on Thursday before deliberations wrapped up was a motion, again led by Alty, to fully fund a homelessness specialist through federal funding rather than paying a share of that cost through the city’s own money.

Federal Reaching Home funding recently increased and can be used to cover the position, council heard. The motion passed unanimously.

You can catch up on nights one, two and three of deliberations in our earlier reporting.

Significant changes made on those nights included the following cuts:

• $60,000 for the restoration of a fire engine;
• $233,000 to turn the green space adjacent to the Fritz Theil baseball diamonds into a soccer field;
• funding for two municipal enforcement officer positions; and
• a new customer service booking supervisor position.

The following items were added:

• $10,000 to try painting bike lanes on some roadways in Yellowknife;
• $45,000 to improve the city’s dog park; and
• waiving fieldhouse track and playground fees in 2025.

Other amendments included increasing the contract for dog pound services to $60,000 from $30,000, to encourage interest from the private sector, after a $500,000 proposal to build a city-owned prefabricated dog pound was rejected. The impoundment service fee will be increased from $100 to $250 a day.

Mayor and council also agreed to defer $95,000 in planned spending for work on intersections near the École St Joseph and NJ Macpherson schools to 2026, to allow city staff time to plan further improvements. They added $10,000 to temporarily address safety concerns at those intersections.

Correction: December 6, 2024 – 18:07 MT. This article initially stated the city had received the same $629,000 sum in the form of a carbon tax grant last year as well, based on 2023-24 reporting by the NWT government. In fact, the territory said by email on Friday evening, the money being talked about is the last financial year’s grant, which simply hasn’t made it to the city yet – this $629,000 will be the first such grant the city has received.