District of Sechelt council voted in committee Wednesday to refund $562,000 in overcharged parcel taxes to property owners on Cowrie Street and in West Sechelt and West Porpoise Bay.
The overcharges — discovered by the District’s finance department and blamed on administrative error — were the result of frontage parcel taxes being charged to property owners after the tax bylaws had expired.
Staff said a total of $210,000 was erroneously charged to properties fronting on Cowrie Street, between Wharf and Shorncliffe avenues, from 2009 to last year. The frontage tax bylaw was adopted in 1993 to fund decorative streetlight standards and underground hydro lines on Cowrie Street and expired in 2008.
Another $352,000 in sewer parcel taxes was erroneously charged to properties in areas of West Sechelt and West Porpoise Bay between 2002, when the parcel tax bylaws were repealed, and last year.
Subject to final council approval, the refunds, plus interest, would be mailed out before the end of May.
Reporting to council at Wednesday’s finance, culture and economic development committee meeting, chief financial officer Victor Mema said the funds from the sewer parcel tax are held in the District’s general sewer surplus while the funds for the Cowrie Street improvements are sitting in general reserves.
Asked by Coun. Mike Shanks whether the refunds would be paid to existing property owners only, Mema said the District took that approach last year, when it refunded $241,000 in sewer fees for West Sechelt properties that were unlikely to be hooked up to the sewer system in the foreseeable future. However, Mema said, the District was subsequently advised by legal counsel that it has an obligation to find previous owners who paid all or portions of the overcharged amounts.
The committee voted unanimously in favour of Mema’s recommendations to refund the impacted property owners.
Mayor Bruce Milne praised the finance department for rooting out the errors, calling it “the really important part of this story.”
“I want to thank finance staff, the entire department for this — first by putting in place an operational review when Victor first came in, following through on that operational review and putting in place the practices and allocation of assigned work that led to the discovery” of the errors, Milne said.
In a release issued Tuesday by the District, Milne apologized to the affected property owners for the oversight.
“Situations like this reinforce the value of conducting regular operational reviews,” Milne said in the release. “In the upcoming organizational review, council is continuing work to ensure the District operations are structured in a way that supports best practices, including examination of procedures on a regular basis to ensure they reflect current legislation.”
