Don Iveson and the infrastructure lie

207%.

That's what the property tax percentage increase has been in Edmonton since 1996, the last year that the city held property taxes at 0. When you consider that before the 4-year 0% era (where Edmonton was in a recession and didn't have the labour and input costs that they have today, which Don Iveson the Coward always throws forward when trying to justify his high-tax socialist plans) the property taxes were in the 4.5% to 6.5% (annual) range, since the building of the new City Hall, City Hall has increased your tax bill by a whopping 256%.

Why is this interesting? Well, as stated before, one of the reasons the Coward Don Iveson tries explaining why your property taxes need to increase further, and why his crew can't possibly do what was possible in the 90s and hold property tax rates steady, is that Edmonton has a so-called infrastructure deficit. You see, apparently the entire time we've been increasing taxes, we haven't been increasing them enough to do the maintenance that apparently is desperately required in this city.

This is, of course, why your tax rates have gone up. It has nothing to do with financial mismanagement, oh no siree Bob. All those roads torn up and rebuilt just to be re-rebuilt again a year or two later? That extra maintenance that was the reason your taxes went up before were still inexplicably insufficient to continue funding infrastructure enhancements today.

The quick question, one may ask somewhat cheekily, is why then the likes of Iveson the Slum-Building Coward are so anxious to waste even more tax dollars building expensive and unnecessary infrastructure in the first place? Why, instead of building an expensive facade onto the art museum which will now need to be maintained with expensive tax hikes in the future, didn't we just sell the damned thing and get it off our books? Why did we build Tallus Balls that will need to be polished so their unseen surfaces continue to gleam? Why are we building a billionaire a hockey arena because the one we have now, which seems to manage just fine and be funded in part by a nonprofit, isn't downtown enough?

Regardless, all you have to think of is the 256% that property taxes have gone up since 1989. In Iveson's vision of Edmonton, this is a pathetically small increase that doesn't properly fund his grandiose future infrastructure needs.

This better not be yours.