Budget and Finances

The Town of Orangeville offers many important services to keep the community on the move and enjoyable for everyone.

These services include:

• Library services
• Fare-free transit
• Recreation programming, facilities, and sports fields
• Fire services
• Road rehabilitation and reconstruction programming

Many of these services are funded from property taxes. These taxes are collected from two main groups:

• Residents who are homeowners
• Businesses and industries like shops, factories, and landowners.

Our town has more homes than big businesses or factories, which means the residential taxpayers have a bigger share of the town’s property tax levy compared to other municipalities that have more businesses and factories to share them.

For many years, the town's budget passed at a rate lower than inflation, which is the cost of things, like supplies and repairs. This created something called a "critical infrastructure gap." What does that mean? It means projects to maintain, fix or replace things were delayed.

This impacted things like:

• Roads
• Buildings and community centers
• Pipes and systems that move water and wastewater

But while we waited, these things got older and needed even more work.

Orangeville isn’t the only one with this problem. Many towns and cities are facing the same challenge because the cost of almost everything has been going up quickly.

Now, the town is working hard to fix this gap. By making smart choices and keeping the budget in line with rising costs, we can take care of repairs and replacements on time. This helps us keep everything safe and running well for the future.

The inflation that impacts us all in our day-to-day lives for things like food, housing, clothes, and transportation is measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

For the Town, big projects like fixing roads, updating and rehabilitating facilities, and buying building supplies are affected by a different kind of inflation. This is called the Non-Residential Building Construction Price Index (NRBCI).

By September of 2024, the NRBCI was at 3.3 per cent. Since the end of 2019, these costs have gone up by over 46 per cent. This is a very large increase, making it more expensive for the Town to take care of important projects.

The proposed 2025 budget is in line with the NRBCI and will allow us to continue working on improving our infrastructure. 

From 2021 to 2023, the Town was switching to police services provided by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), and on a special transitional billing model. Even though the cost of OPP service is going up this year, we are still saving money over previous policing costs.

The estimated increase under the Orangeville Police Service for 2025 would have been approximately $9.5 million. The OPP 2025 cost is about $6.1 million.

The Province provided a temporary $1 million relief investment to assist with the increase in 2025, allowing us to reduce the impact this year.

Our police service levels in the community have remained excellent since the transition.

For further details please review the police services section of the budget document, beginning on page 25.

Assessment growth is the amount of new residential taxpayers projected to move to Orangeville during the budget year.

Although the Town of Orangeville continues to grow, it has done so much slower in recent years. For 2025, growth is projected at 0.53 per cent. This assessment growth does help with tax impacts on property taxpayers by sharing the cost of services over a larger tax base. Lower growth, like we are experiencing now, does not have much of an impact for property owners in Orangeville.

 

There are two reasons why your taxes might be higher than the average increase used as an example in the budget.

Your home/property’s assessed value: 

• If the value of your property is assessed as higher or lower than the average assessment, the monetary amount of the increase in taxes will differ. The overall increase on the Town's portion of all tax bills is 4.99 per cent.
• The value of your home is determined by the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC).
• Typically, MPAC performs an assessment every four years. Updates were paused during the pandemic and the reassessment that should have occurred in 2020 was never undertaken. At this time, the assessment values of properties reflect the January 1, 2016 value and not current market values.
• You can learn more about the process and your assessed value at orangeville.ca/MPAC

Who we collect for:

• The Town collects property taxes for Dufferin County and various school boards in the area.
• The Town's portion of the property tax bill is approximately 62 per cent of the total tax bill.
• Education rates account for around 10 per cent of the total bill and will not change for 2025.
• The remaining 28 per cent is determined by the County and will be factored in following approval of the Dufferin County budget.

 

This year’s budget was built around the idea of making investments rooted in community. Town staff prioritized investments to protect infrastructure, address climate impacts, and maintain or enhance community services. Some of those proposed projects included in this year’s draft budget can be viewed in the section above.