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.

The inflation that impacts us all in our day-to-day lives for things like food, housing, clothes, and transportation is measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

For the Town, big projects like fixing roads, updating and rehabilitating facilities, and buying building supplies are affected by a different kind of inflation. This is called the Non-Residential Building Construction Price Index (NRBCI).

By September of 2024, the NRBCI was at 3.3 per cent. Since the end of 2019, these costs have gone up by over 46 per cent. This is a very large increase, making it more expensive for the Town to take care of important projects.

The proposed 2025 budget is in line with the NRBCI and will allow us to continue working on improving our infrastructure. 

From 2021 to 2023, the Town was switching to police services provided by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), and on a special transitional billing model. Even though the cost of OPP service is going up this year, we are still saving money over previous policing costs.

The estimated increase under the Orangeville Police Service for 2025 would have been approximately $9.5 million. The OPP 2025 cost is about $6.1 million.

Our police service levels in the community have remained excellent since the transition.

For further details please review the police services section of the budget document, beginning on page 25.

Assessment growth is the amount of new residential taxpayers projected to move to Orangeville during the budget year.

Although the Town of Orangeville continues to grow, it has done so much slower in recent years. For 2025, growth is projected at 0.53 per cent, which is worth approximately $222,000. While this does help with tax impacts on property taxpayers, such low growth does not have much of an impact.

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

Who we collect for: The Town collects property taxes for Dufferin County and various school boards in the area. Both the County and the school boards set their own budgets. These amounts are added to the bill we send to you.

Your home/property’s assessed value: 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.

The amount of property taxes you owe are based on the assessment completed by MPAC.

You can learn more about the process and your assessed value at orangeville.ca/MPAC