Council for the R.M. of Dufferin has approved a budget of just over $5 million for 2016/17, a mere $25,000 increase from 2015/16.

"We knew due to reassessments that there would be some hurt," explains Reeve George Gray, who says Council was quite diligent in how it handled budget formulations. As a result, there will be a zero per cent increase in municipal taxation for the new fiscal year. He explains this will allow the Municipality to maintain its current programs and tackle a few items on it's to-do list, while remaining fair and equitable to ratepayers.

While the amount of taxes collected by the R.M. of Dufferin won't change, the burden of payment however has shifted.

Gray says because farmland values have increased exponentially, it'll be those property owners that will face a higher municipal tax bill. On the flip side, this means residential and commercial property owners however could see a substantial decrease.

"What happened (is) the rise in farmland values was larger than the commercial end or residential. So the way the reassessment formula works, it moved into the rise of farmland of which we have a forty-four per cent increase in the R.M. of Dufferin."

Meantime, the R.M. of Dufferin is also calling for a complete review on how school taxes are assessed in Manitoba.

Gray feels that the time has come for this burden to be lifted from land, home and business owners and become a provincial responsibility. Farmers are particularly impacted this time around, as reassessments saw farmland values increase exponentially over residential and commercial. Gray says it's gotten to the point were school taxes eclipse municipal taxes.

"The Prairie Rose School Division, and I sympathize with them in their lack of funding from the province, but in Dufferin for example we had seventeen point one (per cent) increase of school tax." This represents a total increase of about $440,000 in the R.M. of Dufferin. "That's pretty much coming off the backs of the farmers," says Gray.

While he says the reinstatement of the Farmland School Tax Rebate would be nice, Gray feels the new P.C. government will take a strong look at changing things.