The idea of going to an open house on your local municipality’s operating budget doesn’t exactly fill one with enthusiasm. It’s not exactly a night at the movies, after all.
That said, residents of Woodlands County might want to consider one of the four open houses that the municipality will be hosting over the next two weeks, as disaster is looming on the horizon for the county and it would be best to be informed about it.
You can read more on the subject by turning now to Page 10A, but here’s a quick summary of the problem: basically, the county is facing potential bankruptcy in the next couple of years if oil and gas companies don’t pay their taxes.
Yeah, it was kind of shocking to us too.
Apparently, the county is owed something in the neighbourhood of $4 million by oil and gas companies, and if they don’t get paid, the municipality is going to be in a very bleak situation.
So yeah, this is probably something ratepayers want to learn more about firsthand.
But this isn’t a problem specific to Woodlands County, and it’s not a new problem. In fact, after a quick investigation, we learned that the Alberta Association of Municipal Districts and Counties — now known as the Rural Municipalities of Alberta — has been sounding the alarm about this problem for several years now.
In 2016, AAMDC president Al Kemmere said oil and gas companies owed an excess of $18 million to rural municipalities throughout the province.
In 2017, Lacombe County submitted a letter to the province and the associations representing municipalities requesting action by the province to take action on uncollectable taxes owed by oil and gas companies.
Last spring, a group of Alberta municipalities launched a legal challenge of a court ruling that determined municipalities were “unsecured creditors,” which hurt their ability to recover back taxes from delinquent oil and gas companies.
This is just a quick sample of relevant search results taken from Google, but it’s obvious that the issue of uncollectable taxes has been staring us in the face for a while. However, nobody’s really put two and two together and determined HOW BIG of an issue it really is.
One can likely blame the downturn in the oil industry for companies not paying their taxes. Obviously, the last couple years have been exceptionally hard on the sector, as we all well know.
That said, they’ve left us holding the bag, and this simply cannot stand. We will need action by the province, which has tools to collect these debts that are not available to municipalities.
For now, the best option is to educate yourself about this crisis. With the election coming up, we are going to need a provincial government that will actually hold the oil and gas sector to account for what they owe.
