City to Take the Pulse of Business and Industry in P.G.
Prince George, B.C. – If the City of Prince George calls your business today, it’s all about finding out what the City can do to help your business move forward.
The new economic development wing of the City wants feedback from businesses to help it identify needs and opportunities.
Melissa Barcellos is the Manager of Economic Development, she has done this kind of survey work in the past when she was with Initiatives Prince George when more than 100 businesses were interviewed “It’s really meant to keep us up to date on what’s happening in the local economy.” She says the in person meetings provide more detailed information that just isn’t available through national statistics.
Even though the national economy is slow, Barcellos says immediate concerns won’t be held off on action until the final report is released later this year “While the final report may be six months down the road, we will still be able to take information internally and if we identify a business that needs our support now because they are facing big challenges, we can help them now, we don’t have to wait for the final report.”
Barcellos says she’s hopeful to collect information from at least 60 businesses in the community and to work more closely with the representatives recently named to the City’s economic development advisory committee. Businesses will be asked to take part in a private one on one interview that would last about an hour.
“Research shows that 80% of new jobs and investment in communities come from existing businesses so their growth and prosperity is directly linked to the health of our local economy” says Barcellos.
The sessions are set to run through the fall and will be done annually “These meetings will provide an opportunity for us to learn, directly from business representatives, about the benefits and the challenges of doing business in Prince George,” says Barcellos.
Any local business owner or manager who is interested in taking part is encouraged to contact Bahar Mostofee-Afshar, Business Development Officer, City of Prince George, at bahar.afshar@princegeorge.ca or 250.561.7633.
Comments
blah blah blah, nothing ever changes in the city, and we have heard this same rhetoric every year the last 30 years.
The city is impossible to work with. Brutal zoning with no flexibility in adapting to city growth, and the money grab with servicing new developments.
Anyone who has done a job in Kelowna, Kamloops.. and then tried to work in PG can relate.
I’m not in Prince George, but I believe the same problems businesses face nowadays in delivering ‘new jobs’ and additional ‘investment’ there are pretty much universal. Many of them are beyond the scope of municipal or even provincial governments to deal with. But some are not.
And one of those ‘some’ is the way that taxation is levied on the assessed value of business properties. In conjunction with the ever increasing levels of restrictions on what anyone can do on “their” land, and the additional cost of either compliance with, or getting a variance from, these burgeoning requirements, this forms one of the largest direct dis-incentives to small and medium size business growth.
Sadly, much of the type of growth in those sized businesses is indeed what creates more of the much cherished employment every jurisdiction thirsts after.
Let me give you an example. A very personal one. How would you like to receive a BC Assessment notice showing the value of your business property had gone up 80% over what it was valued at the previous year?
On the one hand, you might be thrilled to think that your property was now worth that much more, officially. If you wanted to sell it, what a great gift that would be. But what if you didn’t want to sell it? And realised that an 80% increase in its value was only going to bring you a probably commensurate increase in the Property Tax you were going to have to pay on it six months later?
You might make some enquiries of the nice people at BC Assessment to find out why there had been such an increase. And you might be politely told it’s because other properties similarly zoned to yours had been selling for considerably more than their assessed values lately. And it’s now time to play ‘catch up’. Seems reasonable, doesn’t it? Or does it?
You know that your business has been able to provide you a living for many years, and prospectively for some more to come. But you also know that if you were ever able to sell it, any buyer would have one deuce of a time trying to make payments on it and take out a reasonable living as well. He could do one, or the other, but not both. Not as it is.
And here’s the catch-22 situation. He COULDN’T ‘grow’ your business to make it do both. Zoning restrictions and other current requirements wouldn’t allow him to do that. Anymore than they’d now allow you to grow your business to meet the increased property tax bill on your property that’s said to be worth 80% more now than it was before. So who is that property really worth that much more TO?
Isn’t it time we ended this ridiculous way of collecting taxation on imaginary values, and switched to collecting them on ACTUAL sales or incomes where money actually does change hands? I think so. To do otherwise is squelching the very ‘growth’ we’re trying to induce.
Having these meetings is all well and good, however it would be nice to get some indication of the results of the meetings, and what (if anything) the City is doing about it.
Rehashing different ways of doing the same thing, is not exactly progress. Considering that we have had business’s in Prince George for the past 100 years we should be pretty up to date on what is actually happening in this City.
Is it possible that the Economic Development people are the one’s that have to be brought up to speed. What exactly is their function, and what are their expectations going forward. When can we expect some results.
Our main drivers of business and jobs in this City are pretty specific.
IE Lumber, Pulp and Paper, Chemicals, Construction, Retail, Manufacturing (steel/rebar/culverts/) Transportation, (Trucking companies and Rail) Warehousing and Distribution.
These business’s have been around for many years, and for some of them they have been in a continuous downsizing mode, as opposed to creating jobs. So that is what we need to look at. Why are we losing all these jobs, and what can we do about it.
I agree with socredible. We need to change how taxes are collected. The City along with BC Assessment are basically out of control and are increasing taxes and development costs, etc; for no other reason than to collect sufficient money to keep the City and BC Assessment living the life style they have grown used to.
We are being strangled to death by Governments and Government red tape.
I believe it useful to put Palopu’s legitimate complaint; “We are being strangled to death by Governments and Government red tape.” into context here.
Federally, we have had a Harper Conservative government in power for nearly a decade. Provincially, we have had the Gordon Campbell / Christy Clark government in power for going on 15 years. So which “governments” are you complaining about Palopu?
Perhaps it was a Sherri Green; City of Prince George, government that is the cause of all your woes?
All I see here here Palopu is a right wing political supporter complaining about right wing governments “strangling us to death with red tape”. Please don’t blame this all on a Federal Liberal government that has only been in power for 4 months that would be… kind of sad.
Okay first, Harper was a minority for 6 of those 10 years, and a lot of what he did, was to appease the Liberals or NDP in order to stay in power. Once he got a majority, and did what he wanted, he got tossed. So in fact, we had 6 years of Con/Liberal rule, and 4 years of Con rule. So the current Fed Liberal government isn’t totally blameless when it comes to the last 10 years.
But, this is a story about PG, not the federal or provincial governments. PG made a decision to hold winter games, they paid for it by raising property taxes on all businesses – who pay a much higher rate than residential, few businesses actually benefited from Winter Games, so no matter how much fun it all was, Winter Games was bad for the local businesses, who generate 80% of new employment apparently.
What will happen if PG decides to go for a PAC? How will it be paid for? By raising residential taxes – not likely, residents vote. By raising taxes on businesses. Just keep on taxing. In Kamloops in the early 70’s they took that approach, and the Kamloops Indian band built an industrial park and sucked the new business growth away from the city with reasonable lease rates, and reasonable development fees. Too LTN F.N. weren’t close enough to do a similar thing.
JGalt, no matter which Party is in power, under the current conventions of accounting governments are the only source of needed additional credit to make the economy functional financially.
It is truly amazing that the average citizen never seems to understand how any government that is supposed to be in debt up to its eyeballs to the banks, can turn around and bail out those same banks when too many of their other loans go sour.
It would be even more incredulous to realise that, in order for the economy to function at all, there has to be a constant transmutation of otherwise un-repayable ‘floating’ loans to the private sector into permanently un-repayable ‘fixed’ loans to the public one.
This process naturally leads to the growth of employment in the public sector. And much of this employment is completely superfluous to any REAL need. Other than to provide an excuse to pay someone an income.
As this process continues, and more get on the public payroll, they naturally seek ways to make their positions not only permanent, but increasingly well paid. The real wealth that is necessary to give credence to this financial fantasy falls to fewer and fewer actual workers to actually produce, and those employing them have to, as a necessity for survival, keep getting bigger and bigger. Long term, it won’t work.
Short term, it’s already starting to crack and come apart. NONE of the current political Parties want to face up to these facts. Had we re-elected the Conservatives Federally, they would have been forced to face them fairly quickly. We delayed that process, and set it back considerably, by electing the Liberals. No matter, it’s a problem that won’t go away, and they’ll have to deal with it soon enough, too.
The Federal Liberals (Trudeauites) have not been in power long enough to have any effect on our taxes. However you can rest assured that will change.
The Federal Conservative Government under Harper brought in many tax cuts when they were in power.
What we are talking about here is the Provincial Government, which contrary to popular opinion is not just a right wing Government. People seem to forget that Christy Clark was a long time liberal and so was Campbell. In order for the Liberals to stay in power they had to join forces with the old socreds and conservatives.
So at best we could call them a coalitionist Government. Whatever the name, they have caused us nothing but grief since they came to power. Kissing up to corporations with their right hand, and bringing in tax and service increases like a mad dog socialist with their left hand.
Its common knowledge that Municipalities in BC are overspending and have been for a number of years. They constantly find reasons to raise taxes, and we get very little in return for the increases.
So lets keep it close to home Ie; Provincial and Municipal .
Just to get the Harper Governments tax cuts clarified and off the table lets look at what the Parliamentary Budget Officer has to say.
Canadian are saving more than $30 Billion in federal taxes-or a little less than $1,000 per person-due to tax changes introduced in the past decade.
The calculation from the PBO shows the accumulation of tax relief that has come about since 2005, when the then-liberal government reduced the minimum income tax rate to 15% from 16%.
Since then the Harper Government has raised the basic personal exemption, introduced the Child Tax Credit and Working Income Tax Benefit, pension income splitting and famously sliced two percentage points off the GST to five per cent, among other changes.
The result says the PBO, is that personal income taxes are $17.1 Billion lower today than they might have been, and Canadian consumers are paying about $13.3 billion less in value-added taxes on their purchases of goods and services.
The vast majority of the changes have occurred under the Conservatives, which took place in February 2006.
Another gift to the Government in the report was that the PBO found that in relative terms-lower income Canadian earning between $12,200 and $23,300 benefited the most, increasing their after-tax income by four percent.
So there you have it.
Most businesses today would be very hard to build from scratch due to the huge costs to set up and the small returns they produce. Those that have marginal businesses can harvest them, but would never be able to afford their valuation in an asking price and still produce a profit.
We have transition from a free enterprise economy of equality of access to opportunity based on merit; to an economy of legacy investors monopolizing whole sectors due to size and scales of economy with any gains flowing to outside investors.
We should be asking how can we encourage new entrants to the market that have a business model that is locally focused with influence in circulating more dollars in our community; and then ensure barriers to fair competition are broken down so that entrepreneurs can know that they have a fair shot at a open competition for business.
We could probably start with the housing development sector as the greatest red flag in our local economy, and then we could look at engineering, warehousing-distribution, and access to forestry related fiber as key areas with built in choke points for local growth.
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