Burnaby city council voted Monday to permanently replace a utility fee surcharge the mayor has referred to as an unfair “stove tax.”
During the 2018 campaign, then-candidate Mike Hurley railed against an extra $569 in water and sewage fees levied against homeowners with a second stove. The 50 per cent surcharge was introduced in 2017 to recoup extra utility uses by occupants of secondary suites.
But Hurley criticized the surcharge as unfair to homeowners with disabled children living rent-free in secondary or in-law suites. At the time, he proposed an appeals process to allow exemptions to the fees.
The mayor has since changed his approach to the issue. In March, city council approved a plan to refund the surcharges paid by homeowners not earning rental income from a secondary suite.
According to a city staff report, more than 1,900 people filed a declaration and got their money back.
This week, council moved to make the new approach permanent.
Under the plan, the supplementary utility fees would apply to all single-family homes and duplexes with suites being rented out.
The city plans to send declarations out to 32,000 households this October, with a Nov. 30 return deadline, to determine who needs to pay the extra fees. It will consider a suite “rented” in 2020 if the homeowner says they plan to rent it out for any amount of time that year, including for a short time and to a family member.
If a homeowner declares she or he doesn’t intend to rent out their suite next year, but then changes plans, they will be required to tell the city and pay the $570 surcharge, the city staff report says.
The city also plans to change its rules for house rental business licences. The current bylaw applies to homeowners renting out secondary suites, requiring them to pay $380 for an initial licence and $130 annually thereafter.
The city encountered “issues” while refunding 2019 surcharges as it found “overlap between supplementary utility fees and house rental business licence fees and the under-reporting of house rental businesses within the city,” according to the report.
To address the overlap, Burnaby plans to raise the licence fee to $570 annually, while exempting all licence-holders from the utility surcharge.
The city will also charge $1,000 in fines to anyone found to have made “false or inaccurate declarations.”
The proposed bylaw changes will come to a final vote at a future council meeting.
