Annual Revaluations.

All properties get revalued. This year, properties in the Shire increased by an average of around 10%. The total rates collected for 2021-2022 has no relationship to this average increased property value. If the Shire set a zero rate rise and all properties went up in value by 10% exactly, then everyone would have a zero rate rise for next year. Not a 10% rise.

But the Shire rates properties in separate categories like General Residential, Farming, Commercial and so on. Each category is treated on its own when the revaluations are considered. So, this means that if all properties in Commercial were valued 20% higher than last year and all properties in all other categories were revalued at the same valuation as last year then the Commercial property owners would pay more, and the other category of ratepayers would pay less. The total rates collected by the Shire stays the same as the year before however because revaluations do not increase how much rates are collected shire wide.

The revaluation also occurs within each category. So, in the General residential category if your property increased in value more than your neighbours did than your rates would increase slightly, and your neighbours would reduce slightly compared to you. 

The following table taken from the budget papers shows how much each category of property has increased in value compared to 12 months ago.

So General residential has increase by 12%, Commercial by 6%, vacant rural by 14%.

The categories that increased in value by more than 10.35% will have a larger share of the whole rates bill to pay than last year and categories having revaluations less than 10.35% will have less total rates to pay than last year.

Remember, this only calculates how much each category share is of the total pie before the 1.5% rate capping figure is added and before the waste charge is added.

At this stage however after considering revaluations only, the categories increasing least will have less rates to pay next year than last year. So commercial and industrial would be looking at a lower rates bill than last year.

Second step in the process-adding rate capping amount.

Now the Council calculates 1.5% of the total rates collected and bangs that amount onto everyone’s rates bottom line.

Third step in the process-adding the waste charge on.

For the last 10 years Council has kept the waste charge rate increase to rate capping or less. So that would make no change to the rates totals here except that this year the Council has increased waste charges by around 14%.

The rate capping rules do not prevent Councils jacking waste charges up like this so a nice backdoor approach to increasing your rates whilst being able to say but rate capping was only 1.5% and the rest must be revaluations which don’t increase the total rates.

RUBBISH.-Council claims in the budget papers that the general rates have risen by 2.51%.

This is misleading since they are referring to all rated properties not just the ones in the general category. They also left off the waste charge increase which because 14% is higher than 1.5% will increase all those properties rates by around 1.2% per property.

Finally, they ignored revaluation effects between different property categories.

An analysis of the data from the Council budget papers shows the following average increases on the main rate categories.

General Residential properties rates increased  by 4.31%

Industrial properties decreased by 0.8%
Commercial properties decreased by 2.34%

Farm properties increased by 0.57%

So, the average rate increase for general residential (houses) is nearly 5% before considering if your house increased in value more or less than your neighbours. If your house did better than other houses your rates will likely be a lot higher than 4.77%

So, Council should have said Residential ratepayers will average nearly 5% and some properties will pay a lot more than that.

Expect a big bill this year if you live in a house.