Legislation for the proposed new property taxes must be brought to the Parliament to be debated before they become law says Minister in the Ministry of Finance Mariano Browne.
’People are not going to get up and pay x, y and z tomorrow,’ Browne said as he wound up the Senate’s debate on the 2009/2010 Budget on Friday night.
Seeking to allay the fears of many property owners about the proposed new measure, Browne said it will not yet become law even though the 2009/2010 Budget was passed by the Senate on Friday night and is now set to become law. ’In terms of a legislative agenda, this legislation would have to be brought to Parliament and debated. That is why it is not listed as a fiscal device. It is not listed as a fiscal measure. It is listed as part of a reform measure,’ Browne said in the Senate on Friday night.
In doing so, he also may have been the first Cabinet member to use the phrase ’if and when this legislation is changed’ when he spoke about the plan to amend the existing property tax laws while making reference to the 10 per cent property tax in existence in Chaguanas, San Fernando and Arima. Browne told the Senate that ’most of the commentators’ who have expressed their views on the subject were being ’alarmist’ against the backdrop of protests by property owners in several parts of the country against the new taxes.
’All the negative consequences that they are anticipating would have happened in San Fernando, would have happened in Point Fortin, would have happened in Chaguanas and would have happened in Arima and it has not. And if it has not happened in those four instances it will not happen if and when this legislation is changed. That’s fact,’ Browne said.
He said that all that Finance Minister Karen Nunez-Tesheira did when she announced the proposed new property taxes in her 2009/2010 Budget presentation on September 7, was to articulate a proposal to reform the existing system.
Browne noted the point made by some critics that it is ’politically insensitive’ for the Government to reform the system at this time in what may have been a reference to the fact that Local Government elections are due by July, 2010. Browne spoke of his experience paying property taxes in Barbados to drive home the point that the Government was not being insensitive with its property tax reform in this country.
’I have a lot of land, $150,000 was the cost and my land tax in Barbados was $1,000, Barbados, a year. A thousand because it is an improved site value. A thousand dollars for empty land and I paid water rates every month and my standard water rate bill was approximately TT$240 every month. So at the end of the year I paid $2,400, that’s standard and it is metered,’ Browne said.
He then said that the ’reason why everybody is getting jumpy over’ the property tax reform in this country is because ’the intention is to move to a metering situation’ so as to separate water rates from property values.
