Addington Highlands Sets 2025 Budget – Tax Rate Up By 5.83%

Jeff Green | Mar 26, 2025

When Addington Highlands Coun cil met to look in detail at the 2025 township budget last Thursday (March 20) in Flinton, they were faced with an in crease of over $583,000 (15%) in the levy to ratepayers.

After meeting all morning, and into an afternoon session, with help from senior staff, a number of cuts were made to the budget. These included: $50,000 from the public works budget, $35,000 from the waste budget, $17,000 from the budget to combat invasive species, and $23,000 from the fire budget.

By then transferring $50,000 from working reserve funds into the 2025 budget, the increase had been trimmed to an 8.41% increase in the levy to ratepayers for township funded services.

When looking at what Council called the “combined rate” with Lennox and Addington County and Education tax rates included, the increase in the tax bill that Addington Highlands ratepayers will receive this year is 5.83%.

The impact in dollar terms for property owners, is a rate increase of $83.85 for every $100,000 of assessed value on their property.

“Given the fact that everything else has gone up, quite dramatically, I don't think 5.83% is out of line,” said Reeve Henry Hogg. “5.83 is very much in close line with our two major increases, which obviously was the price of goods and our wage increase,” said Deputy Reeve Tony Fritsch. “There is probably nothing else, net-wise, that has increased. We are just covering costs that we will incur. We are not introducing any new programs, we are not making any major changes on levels of service. We are going to invest in our roads and our facilities to keep them in good repair at the level they are at now. I don't think it makes sense to cut the levy increase below what our costs really are. I think that is going backwards.”

“We could lower the increase and eventually we are going to be saying to Brett [Public Works Manager Brett Reavie] over here, you have to take one truck out of each ward ... then we are going to have to do twice as much work with half as much equipment,” said Councillor Kirby Thompson.

Also for perspective, Chief Administrative Officer/Treasurer Christine Reed pointed out that the increase in the combined rate increased by 6.61% in 2024, and 4.16% in 2025.

Briefs from Council - Before the day-long budget meeting on Thursday of last week, Council held a regular meeting on Tuesday (March 18). It was a short meeting, but included a discussion about the final wording of the backyard chicken bylaw that has been in the works since the beginning of the year, and has been back to Council more than once, with a view towards coming up with wording that provides clarity.

The goal of the exercise is to balance the desire of some residents who live in the built up areas of the township, to raise a small number of meat or laying hens, with the interest of their neighbours who may be impacted.

When the bylaw came back to Council this week, Councillor Ken Hook had a couple of new suggestions, minor word changes and deletions. “No bylaw is perfect,” he said,” but maybe if we make a couple of changes, it can be a little closer to perfect. The bylaw was originally designed to create rules for keeping laying hens, but was later changed to accommodate meat birds as well, resulting in some wording issues. It will return to Council once more, on April 8th, for discussion, with the intention of being adopted by bylaw on April 22.

Green Ribbons Lori Snider sent in her annual request to mark Mental Health Awareness Month, which is May, with a green ribbon campaign. Snider said her group would provide ribbons and hang them up around the township in May, and remove them at the end of the month. The township has supported this in previous years and will do so again this year.

Load Restrictions in Place - Public Works Manager Brett Reavie reported that load restrictions are in place now on both township and county roads. Public Works staff have been patrolling the roads to identify issues that need to be ad dressed when the roads dry up. On the waste site front, he reported that the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks has at long last approved the township’s closure plan for the Denbigh Waste Site, and Reavie hopes that the work to complete the plan will be done by township staff by the end of the summer.