KENORA — City council has trimmed Kenora’s property tax increase, and Mayor Andrew Poirier said this week he hopes they can trim it some more.
At the start of Monday’s committee of the whole meeting, the property tax levy increase for 2025 was sitting at 9.33 per cent. By the meeting’s end, it was 7.85 per cent.
Administration will look into how the increase could be trimmed further, and then “we’ll look to have another scheduled meeting, hopefully before the end of February,” Poirier said.
There are “a couple pieces on the revenue side that we’ve talked about,” he said.
“One of them is increasing the dividend that we pay back to the city through our Prosperity Fund.”
The KMTS Citizens Prosperity Trust Fund comprises money the city got when it sold the Kenora Municipal Telephone System to Bell Aliant in 2008.
The city will look at taking a bigger dividend from the fund without diminishing the principal, Poirier said.
“We’re all taxpayers around that table. I think sometimes people forget that,” he said.
“So whether we’re there or not there, we pay taxes also, and I’ve always thought that we should do as fulsome a job as possible to make sure that we’re looking at all aspects of the budget and bringing in the least increase of taxes that we can.”
Running a city costs money, he said, “so there’s going to be a cost to the taxpayers. We’re just trying to mitigate it as much as possible.”
