Rates

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31096, 27 June 1966, Page 12

Rates

Sir, —To share the burden of rates more equitably, has the Christchurch City Council considered rating on annual value? A neighbour of ours owns a property converted into three flats. He occupies the largest and nets £ll weekly on the other two. He his three refuse tins to collect to our one, has three sewer installations, three families using cars over the council’s footpath to the property driveway. Yet he pays less rates than we do in a private home. Another home, converted into two flats, returns the wealthy absentee owner £lO weekly

and again the rates are much lower than ours. Let the council rate each unit of a property; in their high rentals, the tenants pay a share of rates. After all, where two houses are built on one section sharing a driveway, the Council does not give the owners one rate demand and tell them to share it.:—Yours, etc., WIDOWED RATEPAYER.

June 21, 1966. [The chairman of the City Council’s finance Committee (Cr. H. P. Smith) replies: “The council has not considered rating on annual value. I agree that the system has much to commend it and it deals equitably with cases which your correspondent quotes. However, there are substantial administrative problems which to date have discouraged most local bodies from adopting it.”]

Sir, —I write in appreciation of your leading article on rates. It is quite time that a civic tax of 5s was 1 levied on everyone. It would be fair, and, with P.A.Y.E. easily, negotiated. For a government not to adhere to this is unworthy of democracy. I am a widow living on unearned income and for over 20 years have had my rates go up by leaps and bounds. A well-kept home and garden should be an asset to a city and not a drag on its owner.—Yours, etc., . RATES. June 23, .1966.