With the release of the new provincial budget, the Town of Okotoks has had to make some slight adjustments to property taxes.

Requisitions were released for education, where every municipality collects education taxes on behalf on the province, and those rates were up and a settlement with the firefighter's union lead to an increase in taxes for the fiscal year from 1.6 percent to 3.2 percent.

Councillor Tanya Thorn says the Town was in a bind on making adjustments even though they committed to just a 1.6 percent increase during budget discussions last year.  

"Because the government was really late in getting that information out, usually we kind of know what that's going to be by the end of the year and we didn't this year so we just went with the approach of status quo but that wasn't the case," she says. "So we actually saw close to an 8.1 percent increase in education requisitions."

Thorn says despite the rate increase, council was to keep the rate lower than it could have been.

"This time around growth served us well and the reason I say that is because we didn't have to increase it as much. Because of that provincial requisition; because of growth. So the new building and the new growth that has come in helped us this time because we were able to offset some of that 8.1 percent increase from the province."

Thorn says at the end of the day, council can't control what happens in Edmonton.

"Yes our taxes are going to be higher than we as a council would have liked but everything that's there are things that were beyond our control. We don't dictate the provincial requisition and we had no idea when exactly when we'd see a settlement.  We kind of hoped we would see one in 2016 but we weren't able to budget for that."

The tax increase will come into effect in 45 days.

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