Saskatoon city council raises property taxes 4.96% next year

Saskatoon city councillors approved a municipal budget that will raise property taxes 4.96 per cent in 2025.

Under the new rate, the average homeowner would pay about $9.14 more a month — based on a property value of $344,000.

"I think we did our job," Mayor Cynthia Block said. "I think residents expect us to continue to fund core services and asset management, but they also wanted us to sharpen our pencils in order to make sure that we could get a property tax rate that was more in line with inflation. I'm happy with this budget."

The property tax increase came in lower than the original 5.64 per cent increase councillors agreed to as part of the city's two-year budget process last year.

Changes made over budget deliberations Monday and Tuesday created seven new items to consider — which included adding funding for a sixth snow event, reducing fees, lowering revenue projections and adding two additional fire inspector bylaw officers dedicated to the emergency wellness centre and other shelter sites to help mitigate a backlog of more than 4,000 property maintenance complaints.

"I think they found a good balance of, you know, finding some extra money to put towards snow and ice, more money for fire inspectors in regard to the emergency wellness center and the support that they can provide," the city's chief financial officer Clae Hack said.

"Council found a really good balance of trying to make some progress on things that are important to citizens while trying to balance that affordability perspective."

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Ward 9 councillor Bev Dubois made it clear throughout budget deliberations that she would not support a property tax increase over five per cent. When conversations wrapped up, she was happy to narrowly achieve her goal.

"The citizens of Saskatoon want it. They want the lowest we can possibly decide on," Dubois said.

However, she did admit other fees like the black cart utility and the wastewater utility rates are put on a separate bill to residents which do not affect the mill rate.

"So, the citizens of Saskatoon still pay a lot more than the 4.96 (per cent) mill rate," Dubois said.

Last year, the city spent dozens of hours of meetings throughout the summer and fall to build a budget from scratch after administration made the highly unusual step of announcing a $75 million revenue gap for 2024 and 2025, before ultimately approving a 6.04 per cent property tax increase — the highest increase since 2014 when taxes increase 7.43 per cent.

Hack says because of the city's two-year budget, many decisions were already made for this year, and that helped keep conversations from going into a third or fourth day.

"The goal is to more focus on adjustments," Hack said. "It's a little bit more of a streamlined process, which creates a bit more efficiency on the admin side. We're allowed to do more work during the year rather than just constantly budgeting."

One unusual aspect of the 2025 budget deliberations was the new faces on council. Six new councillors were voting on the city's $1.4 billion overall budget after spending just nine days on the job following the civic election on Nov. 13.

Block was impressed with how engaged the new councillors were with such little experience in council chambers.

"That's the part that I've been really inspired by. I'm finding that they are a very good, reasonable bunch," she said. "They're just trying really hard to understand the complexities of the challenges we face and do the best job they can for residents, and at the end of the day, that serves our city well."

Dubois said many of the veteran councillors were helping out with some of the nuances and answering questions some of the newer councillors may have had. After an eventful first two weeks on the job, a rest may be in order.

"They've only been on the job for nine days, and in those nine days it's been a very full nine days with the with their orientations and inauguration and many other things," she said.

"I thought they did a very good job."