Increased police and fire protection costs and downloading from senior governments have led to a significant increase in property taxes for 2025 for North Cowichan taxpayers.
Council has approved a budget that will see property taxes increase by 7.83 per cent or $154.41 for an average single-family dwelling valued at $761,839.
Downloading of the cost of funding 9-1-1 dispatch services is responsible for two per cent of the almost 8 per cent increase in taxes. RCMP costs, including extra staff and the new detachment, accounted for 2.3 per cent of the 2025 tax increase.
The E-Comm 911 costs have been downloaded to nine municipalities on southern Vancouver Island, including North Saanich, Sidney, and Langford, impacting their 2025 budgets. This means the municipalities are now responsible for funding the costs previously covered by the province or other entities.
Sidney anticipates a $331.5K cost for the first nine months of the service, representing a 2.5% tax impact.
Langford’s budget will be impacted by a tax hike of 9.77% to cover E-Comm costs.
“There was a large bump in our VIRL funding at 0.6% with our fire department and the by-election rounding out extra costs this year,” explained Coun. Chris Istace, a Chemainus business owner.
“The rest of our budget was nearly all directed to capital infrastructure projects and ongoing costs associated with the unprecedented growth and population pressures in North Cowichan.”
Istace said he would like to have seen more money allocated for capital projects.
“I was supportive of the budget and personally I am on record stating we didn’t commit to enough capital repairs and investment which is going to hurt us in the long run,” he said.
“For so many years there has been a push to have the lowest taxes but we are now paying the price of not properly investing in our assets. Costs have gone up and by not doing needed repairs, maintenance and upgrades when we should have, we are now faced with large spikes in capital project work.
“Council has a policy that the annual budget commits 15 per cent of that budget to infrastructure asset management. Since 2011 we have not achieved that once and I pushed in my debates and votes to see it properly funded.”
Istace says not setting aside money for capital projects is going to create problems in the future and will likely lead to large tax increases in the coming years.
“Currently we are sitting at a backlog of about $40 million in needed investment,” Istace said. “If we are ever to hopefully achieve that we need to start preparing our residents. Shooting for low taxes is not in our best interest.
“We should expect higher taxes to ensure we are responsibly looking after the assets that the public has a vested interest in as the owners of in North Cowichan.”
Istace encourages taxpayers to check out the breakdown in their tax bill.
“Not included in the Municipal portion of the annual taxes is the CVRD portion. People really only mention their entire tax bill rather than the breakdown.”
Here is the link to this year’s CVRD North Cowichan tax bill insert breakdown as CVRD taxes are finalized.
https://www.cvrd.ca/DocumentCenter/View/7526/CVRD-Municipality-of-North-Cowichan-Tax-Brochure?bidId=
“This year is the final year of regional recreation so that means in 2026 we won’t see that large correction anymore and just minor budget adjustments,” Istace added.