Sechelt council has adopted a bylaw which halves the Girl Guides of Canada Camp Olave's permissive tax exemption to $128,500, while maintaining full exemptions for the remaining churches, community and charitable groups in the District.
On Friday, Oct. 30, more than 70 Girl Guides and Scouts representatives packed into Sechelt's municipal hall for a special council meeting.
With a motion to adopt the bylaw on the floor, councillors Alice Lutes, Ann Kershaw and Keith Thirkell gave their reasons for supporting it.
"We have to find more revenue to do the work of the council, and we are looking at all the exemptions next year," Lutes said.
Kershaw said if the bylaw were to be defeated - due to a looming Oct. 31 deadline by which council legally had to finalize its budget - not one of the other charitable groups named would get their exemption for 2010.
"Not just the Girl Guides. Nobody. And I don't think we want that to happen," Kershaw said.
Thirkell spoke about the burden that permissive tax exemptions place on Sechelt taxpayers, whose taxes rise to cover both municipal taxes forgiven and other regional taxes - such as hospital, recreation and school taxes - which the municipality pays on the exempted organization's behalf.
"Roughly 10 per cent of our gross taxes are forgiven every year. It's a heavy burden for a small community to carry," said Thirkell. "We live close to Vancouver so a lot of groups from Vancouver come up here and use our wonderful shoreline for the betterment of B.C's population. But I still think we need, as a District of only 9,500 people, to take into consideration the burden on all the taxpayers."
Coun. Fred Taylor spoke against the bylaw, saying that while he feels the exemptions do need to be revisited, the sticking point for him was fairness.
Coun. Alice Janisch echoed this position with more vehemence.
"I am personally embarrassed to be associated with springing this on a worthy organization and no other non-profit at this time," she said. "I don't understand the reasoning behind it, and I think it's disgraceful."
After the vote passed - with Lutes, Kershaw, Thirkell and Mayor Darren Inkster voting for it, and Taylor, Janisch and Warren Allen against - and the meeting wrapped up, council took questions from the floor.
Council was asked if Camp Olave could break away from the District to join the Sunshine Coast Regional District (SCRD) as a way of avoiding the tax bill.
Inkster directed the question to SCRD board chair Donna Shugar, who was in the gallery.
"If we had a request, we could do some investigation into that," Shugar said. "As the director for Roberts Creek, which is the adjacent community, we'd be very happy to take Camp Olave into Roberts Creek just speaking off the top of my head."
Shugar said if the province accepted the move, Camp Olave would be entitled to a provincial tax exemption such as Camp Byng gets.
Inkster pointed out that, in due course, Roberts Creek might look at getting incorporated, which would put the tax issue back on the table.
"That may be the case," Shugar said, "however, your experience would indicate that a different process would be advisable."
After the meeting, Inkster spoke to Girl Guides representatives about two possible solutions to their tax bill: getting the provincial government to assess their property at a zero value or else persuading the province to cover the provincial portion of their tax bill, which he says Sechelt has been paying.
"I think my council would be amenable to not collecting our [municipal] portion of the tax and also asking the province to pick up the portion that they shouldn't be asking us to pay, like other provinces do," Inkster said.
Girl Guides representatives, however, voiced their strong disappointment with the bylaw's adoption and their concern that these new avenues might not solve their tax problem.
"You should realize that should those efforts fail and we are saddled with a very large tax bill, we have no resources to pay that," said Krysha Derbyshire, speaking on behalf of the Guides. "We cannot begin to sell an additional 100,000 boxes of Girl Guide cookies, which is what we need the profit on to pay [the tax]."
