Making Cold Lake Beautiful

Council offers additional incentive to beautify business

City council is offering an additional rebate to assist those businesses that expand or enhance their building space to deliver services to the community.

“It’s important to continue providing retention and attraction incentives for our commercial businesses,” said Mayor Craig Copeland. “Our original policy is able to help if the property value increased, but we wanted to give businesses a bit more of a hand.”

In 2010, council passed a policy to help small groups and businesses get started, grow their business, or make improvements to their properties based off of an increased property value.

The original policy has been updated to grant a business owner a rebate worth 100 per cent of the municipal tax increase resulting from the increase in the assessed value of the property. This is an increase from the original 50 per cent, and is paid out over three years.

Though this rebate requires an increase in the business’s property value to qualify, council has decided to add an additional incentive for businesses to make improvements or upgrade.

For businesses making enhancements to existing buildings, a one-time tax rebate of 10 per cent of the municipal tax assessment would be returned to the business, even if the property value of the establishment did not increase.

“This means that a business doing a complete renovation inside their building can benefit from the policy,” said Copeland. “Property assessments don’t usually increase with improvements on the inside of the building, so this gives people renovating a chance to get a rebate on their taxes.”

The motion was passed at the Jan. 10 council meeting, and comes into effect immediately. For more information, go to www.coldlake.com under Bylaws and Policies, or contact the Planning and Development Department at 780-594-4494.