Budget and Finances

The Town of Orangeville offers many important services to keep the community on the move and enjoyable for everyone.

These services include:

• library services
• fare-free transit
• recreation programming, facilities, and sports fields
• fire services
• road rehabilitation and reconstruction programming

Many of these services are funded from property taxes. These taxes are collected from two main groups:

• Residents who are homeowners
• Businesses and industries like shops, factories, and landowners.

Our town has more homes than big businesses or factories, which means the residential taxpayers have a bigger share of the town’s property tax levy compared to other municipalities that have more businesses and factories to share them.

For many years, the town's budget passed at a rate lower than inflation, which is the cost of things, like supplies and repairs. This created something called a "critical infrastructure gap." What does that mean? It means projects to maintain, fix or replace things were delayed.

This impacted things like:

• Roads
• Buildings and community centers
• Pipes and systems that move water and wastewater

But while we waited, these things got older and needed even more work.

Orangeville isn’t the only one with this problem. Many towns and cities are facing the same challenge because the cost of almost everything has been going up quickly.

Now, the town is working hard to fix this gap. By making smart choices and keeping the budget in line with rising costs, we can take care of repairs and replacements on time. This helps us keep everything safe and running well for the future.

Assessment growth is the increase in property values during for all property types such as commercial, industrial, institutional, multi-residential and residential. It occurs when the value of new, expanded or improved properties exceed the value of property devaluations (meaning the market value has gone down due to a physical change in the property) across all property classes.

This assessment growth does help with tax impacts on property taxpayers by sharing the cost of services over a larger tax base. Lower growth, like we are experiencing now, does not have much of an impact for property owners in Orangeville.

Although the Town of Orangeville continues to grow, it has done so much slower in recent years. For 2026, growth is projected at 0.22 per cent. 

There are two reasons why your taxes might be higher than the average increase used as an example in the budget.

Your home/property’s assessed value: 

• If the value of your property is assessed as higher or lower than the average assessment, the monetary amount of the increase in taxes will differ. 
• The value of your home is determined by the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC).
• Typically, MPAC performs an assessment every four years. Updates were paused during the pandemic and the reassessment that should have occurred in 2020 was never undertaken. At this time, the assessment values of properties reflect the January 1, 2016 value and not current market values.
• You can learn more about the process and your assessed value at orangeville.ca/MPAC