Highly! Rates are up.
At the Extraordinary Meeting held on 21 July, Council approved the rate levels for the 2017-18 year. IPART, having considered MidCoasts application for increases, agreed to increases of 10% for this current financial year and 5% for the following two years. This year's approved increase was one percent less than Council requested because the "rate peg" had been dropped from 2.5% to 1.5%.
What does this mean for the 401 North Arm Cove urban (village) properties?
Council expects to collect $557,354 in rates from our village area. To do this it charges a base figure per property plus an amount per $ of unimproved land value. The latest valuations which were made in 2016 are used for this calculation.
The base applying within our village area is $572. The per $ rate is 0.003752 - or $3.752 per $1000 of unimproved land value. For example, if the land value was assessed at $200,000, the rates would be $572 + 200x3.752 = 1322.40.
This amount doesn't include the additional applicable onsite sewage, domestic waste management and waste management charges or take into account any discounts such as pensioner rebate.
The bottom line figure on my rates notice has actually gone up by more than 15% over last years figure. Excluding all the add-ons the increase is over 27%! This presumably means that North Arm Cove property prices have increased further in value than properties elsewhere in the Great Lakes area.
The non-urban ("farmland") rate base is $336 with a per $ rate of 0.003387. The number of North Arm Cove non-urban blocks to which these rates apply is not specified in the Council's papers. Across the whole of the old Great Lakes area 4121 "farmland" properties are identified. A majority of these would be small lots in the North Arm Cove area.
