As anyone who lives in Winnipeg knows, the biggest campaign promise of last year's election was to freeze property taxes. This has long been a staple of Mayor Katz's platform. Mayor Katz attacked his opponents during the election stating that property taxes are regressive and unfairly affect the disadvantaged, which makes his latest budget all the more interesting.

Yesterday's budget revealed an expected property tax freeze, but in addition to this he also announced increases to recreation fees and frontage levies to cover the difference. While neither increase is regressive in the strictest sense, both are problematic and could have adverse impacts on lower income families.

Recreation services provided by the city are used by everyone regardless of their income and social status. Lower income families will be the most affected by this since they have a limited pool of funds to work with and will need to make difficult decisions about what they should sacrifice in order to afford the increased recreation fees. This is a smaller pressure for higher income families since they have a larger pool of funds to allocate and more discretionary expenses to choose from.

Frontage levies are also problematic since they are applied without consideration to the value of the property. You could own a practically worthless house with a wider lot and be charged more than a well-kept house on a narrower lot. This tax does a poor job of discriminating between the haves and the have-nots of society since it is based on an arbitrary measure which has little link to a families income level.

While Mayor Katz has kept his word about the property tax freeze, it is readily apparent that the cost of this policy is rapidly mounting and will have negative impacts on disadvantaged families. One hopes that future tax, fee and levy increases will be more balanced in their impact to families in the city.