22 mars 2023
Belœil
A trader rises up against his tax hikes
By: Olivier Denommee
When the City of Beloeil announced in its last budget that its entire 6.5% increase in its budget would be entirely absorbed by businesses since it decided to freeze residents’ tax bills, it was possible to anticipate that some traders will cringe. One of them just made a public outing last week to denounce it.
This is the Joy’s Barbershop barbershop, located on André-Labadie Street. Its owner, Joy San, has let it be known that it is no longer able to maintain its prices and that it will have to increase them soon. “This decision was taken following a 30% increase in the property tax for businesses in Beloeil as well as a commercial interest rate [à la banque] by almost 10%. These situations, beyond our control, have had an impact on our operating costs and have made it necessary to increase costs to maintain our quality of service and our commitment to you, ”says the owner in a Facebook post.
Although the figures shared by Mr. San do not exactly match the observations made by the newspaper on official City documents, the increase noted remains quite high – around 20% compared to the 2022 tax bill – leading the account of the business at around $9,500 a year, not to mention the mortgage. “I have to work more, but I don’t make more money. And this increase is done without transition and without financial assistance,” he maintains in an interview, recalling that while some companies can speed up certain processes to be more profitable, it is impossible to do in hairdressing. “It’s going to make haircuts to offset this cost increase!” »
Since then, new prices have come into effect in the last few days: seeking to make a compromise, the barbershop has increased its prices by around 15%, but is offering several “discounts” at the start of the week, from Monday to Wednesday. equivalent to the increase in order to be able to retain its customers who are concerned about the prices of its services. It is still too early to know the real impact of this change on the company’s traffic, but Joy San admits to being surprised to find that when his message was published, he almost only received messages of encouragement even if he broke bad news to his clients.
Despite this, he intends to make his dissatisfaction known to the City and plans to participate in the question period at the next public council meeting, next Monday. “I want to be able to explain why I have to raise prices to my customers. […] I have been in Beloeil for 12 years. If I had started with such a tax account, I think I would never have been able to open my business. When I received my account, the first thing that crossed my mind was to think about moving somewhere else. »
Mr. San also intended to organize a demonstration in front of City Hall to give other entrepreneurs like him and their customers a chance to express their dissatisfaction with this situation, which will mean that this are the consumers who will have to foot the bill at the end. At the time of writing these lines, however, nothing had yet been decided on this subject.
Opportunity to challenge role
Remember that the three-year property assessment roll was revised last fall and that Beloeil experienced a record increase, reaching 40% more than the previous assessment in the residential sector. The Mayor of Beloeil, Nadine Viau, maintains that a citizen or a merchant who feels that his new assessment is much too high can and should contest his assessment, which could in certain cases help to reduce the tax bill if the assessment is actually revised downwards at the end of the process. “We have no political power over the assessment, but a 43% increase for a single-family home doesn’t make sense,” comments Ms. Viau. She is therefore not worried that owners of commercial and industrial buildings will contest their property assessment en masse by the deadline, May 1st. However, this is not an avenue that Joy’s Barbershop favored at the time of the interview, even if the value of its building has increased by approximately 12.3% compared to the previous three-year assessment roll, according to the journalist’s comments.
