; bis
y Be ee is,
ate See ae MRS

THE CORPORATION OF THE CITY OF PORT COQUITLAM
FEB ~ 4 1991

TO B. Kirk DATE: February 01, 1991
City Administrator

FROM: J. Maitland,
City Treasurer.

SUBJECT: Forrest Property Assessments

RECOMMENDATION:

That City Council encourage the Province to change the Assessment Act so that the
protection offered under 26-4 is extended to all residential properties.

BACKGROUND COMMENTS:

The Forrest family has appeared before Council and expressed their concern over the
increases in the assessed value of their properties along the river.

Our local area assessor appeared before Council on January 14th and outlined the process
they went through to determine the valuation of the Forrest properties. Basically there are
two reasons for the increases:

* the properties were incorrectly valued in previous years; and
* recent sales in the area have affected their valuation.

We asked our solicitor for an opinion of section 26-4 of the Assessment Act which is
intended to protect long term residents from the valuation of their property according to its
potential. Section 26-4 requires the assessor to value the property by "taking into
consideration only the actual use of the land and ... not taking into consideration any other
use to which the land or improvements could be put,"

Our solicitor’s opinion is that the assessor has correctly interpreted section 26-4 as it is
worded to only allow consideration of properties which are clearly used just for residential
purposes, Multiple use properties such as the Forrest’s do not qualify.

The recommendation is to have the Assessment Act changed so that the protection given
under section 26-4 is expanded to provide this same protection to the residential portion of
mixed use properties. The recommendation would remove the impact of adjacent land
sales for commercial and multi-family residential uses from affecting the Forrest property.

LATE ITEM
RECEIVED AT;
MR nun SED

. LEB = 11994

Continued Page 2...