Rio Tinto Alcan VP Paul Henning is not thrilled with city council’s tax apportionment decision, but he’s philosophical.
Council voted to hike RTA’s taxes 8.66 per cent while dropping those in every other classification by just over 11 per cent.
Henning said that was an increase in costs “which we struggle with when it looks as though it’s been cut disproportionately.”
Saying he understood that RTA was by far the majority of the major industrial tax base today, he added, “At the end of the day it is money we have to pay that is inflationary on our metal costs.”
Noting that the decision translates to a tax hike of close to a million dollars, Henning added, “It’s not a small amount of money, it’s a million dollars that I could have used somewhere else.”
At the same time, as he had said before, “We’re about having a functioning, safe, secure town. Employees enjoy that, we enjoy that too.”
That said, “We have to really take a look at what are the ‘nice to haves’ and what are the ‘must haves’.”