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2- The Oakville Beaver, Wednesday May 21, 2008 www.oakvillebeaver.com Chamber officials fear high charges discourage business development Continued from page1 relay appleby hosts oakville relay Appleby College and the Canadian Cancer Society ­ Oakville Unit will team up to provide hope and raise funds at Relay For Life, held on Appleby's campus Friday, June 6 to Saturday, June 7. Relay For Life is a celebration of survival and a tribute to the lives of loved ones who have been touched by cancer. for life To learn more about Relay For Life at Appleby College, visit www.appleby.on.ca 540 Lakeshore Road West, Oakville 905-845-4681 The total for Halton Hills is $27,096 and Milton is $24,810. At the bottom of the list was Toronto, which charges just $11,524 in development charges. At the top was Brampton, topping $35,000. Since residential development charges are passed onto the homebuyer, the President of BILD, Michael Moldenhauer, fears that homeownership is being pushed out of the reach of many families. "We recognize that GTA municipalities require revenues from development charges to help offset infrastructure costs resulting from new growth," he said. "But, the present situation is simply unfair. Communities have been forced to increase development charges to unsustainable levels for new homebuyers." Established in 1921, BILD represents more than 1,500 member companies engaged in residential land development, home building, professional renovation and all related supply, service and professional industry segments. Entitled Over The Top, the report pulled together devel- opment charges data collected from GTA municipalities. Available for viewing at www.bildgta.ca, the report concluded that since 2001, the average DCs have increased by more than 6.5 times the rate of inflation. The BILD report comes at a time when both the Town of Oakville and Halton Region are pondering another development charge increase, something that the Oakville Chamber of Commerce is also trying desperately to prevent. "Development charges (industrial and commercial) are one of the few economic tools that a local municipality has as an attractor for business," said John Sawyer, executive director of the Oakville Chamber of Commerce. "We compete with municipalities all around us, and if you look at what some of the municipalities in the (United) States can do, they can actually pay incentives to bring companies to them. We can't do that here, but we still have to compete with those people. We have to be competitive." Sawyer noted that low development charges are one of the things businesses look Isn't it wonderful that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world? - Anne Frank or A At York, we've developed a furnace that modulates, or adjusts itself in 1% increments. So it's quieter, more economical and highly efficient while keeping the temperature in your home on target. After all, your ur comfort is not something you want to play games with. For more information, call your local York Dealer. Come to the Circle of Friends Charity Golf Classic to help the kids of ErinoakKids For information go to www.erinoakkids.ca then click Events · or call 905-491-4452 www.yorkupg.com Play golf · Be a sponsor · It's all for the kids Don't wait another moment Terry Tripp c 905 580 5972 (sales) Richard Bodsworth c 289 259 3567 (service 24-hour) for when determining where they will put down roots, but with Oakville's industrial and commercial development charges currently the sixth highest in the GTA, and with preparations underway by the Region to raise them 114 per cent, opportunities for business development are being lost. "One of them was a logistics company that represented 750 jobs and it's not coming here now," said Katherine Hollinsworth, an Oakville Chamber of Commerce policy analyst. "That looks like the way things are going." While Sawyer noted that business development would be the main victim of higher development charges, he said it will be the people of Oakville who suffer in the long run. The Oakville Economic Development Alliance (OEDA), which is made up of the Town, the Oakville Chamber of Commerce and local community business, estimates that if new business investment in Oakville were to slow by just 20 per cent, residential property taxes would increase by almost eight per cent or $271 per household annually. Town staff, though, is not ready to buy the argument that higher development charges discourage business investment. "I think a business decides where it's going to go based on a number of factors. Costs to develop also include land costs, construction costs and then they also look at what their ongoing costs are going to be. If you don't have development charges, those costs have to be funded through taxes, so I guess it's which the developer wants to pay? Does he want to pay it up front or pay higher taxes," said Patti ElliotSpencer, director of finance and Town of Oakville treasurer. Elliot-Spencer countered that rising housing prices are more the fault of the market than development charges. The Oakville Chamber of Commerce believes that instead of scaring new businesses away from Oakville with high development charges, the Region and the Town should work harder to bring in more businesses whose investment will offset the cost of development charges. "Businesses pay two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half times the taxes that a residential taxpayer pays. They use less than half the services," said Sawyer. For Halton Regional Chair Gary Carr it makes more sense to get the money from the Federal and Provincial governments. "We need to have the business community, people like BILD (and the Oakville Chamber of Commerce), put pressure on the federal government to fund some of this infrastructure because right now they haven't participated at all in terms of helping with the infrastructure, so it falls back to the municipalities," said Carr. "What I would say to people like BILD is, `You have a federal government out there that's got about a $13 billion surplus, it's time they started paying for some of this infrastructure like the roads and the sewers.' Otherwise if we don't pass it on to the developers than the existing taxpayers have to pay it and that's not fair." The Region will be holding meetings on the development charge issue this week and next week while the Town will be looking into its development charges over the next nine months. -- With files from Jason Misner