The company building the new convention centre is getting a boatload of tax money for the project, but it doesn’t like its own tax bill. Rank, Inc., owner of the Nova Centre complex now under construction downtown, also owns an office complex at 7051 Bayers Road. The company is appealing its 2013 tax assessment for the Bayers Road property to the Utility and Review Board.
The provincial and city governments will collectively pay Rank $13.3 million annually for the amortized construction costs and operations and upkeep of the convention centre. That’s a total of $332.5 million over the 25-year term of the deal. And that’s on top of the money the federal government has already committed to the project.
The deal with the federal government was announced in August, 2011, after Rank owner Joe Ramia successfully argued that repeated delays by his government partners in the convention centre complex had increased his costs. The original deal had the feds giving Rank $47 million; the final agreement increased that amount to $51.4 million.
But documents filed with the UARB show that just as Ramia was negotiating for more money from the federal government, events were unfolding that led to dramatic increases in the tax assessment on the Bayers Road property.
Tax bills are based on tax assessments from two years before, so Rank’s 2013 bill is based on the 2011 assessment. On May 30, 2011, the Property Services Valuation Corporation sent Rank an “incomes and expenses” letter asking for information to help determine the assessed value of the Bayers Road property. By law, the firm had 30 days to submit the information. On June 27, 2011 Rank sent a copy of the letter to Giselle Kakamousias, a vice-president at the real estate consulting firm Turner Drake.
Kakamousias testified before the Assessment Appeal Tribunal that she had prepared the requested documents on July 27, 2011, but the documents “were Inadvertently not submitted that day,” according to a transcript of the proceedings. After the 30-day requirement had passed, PVSC went ahead and calculated an assessment of $11,615,011, an eight percent increase over the previous year’s assessment. Rank’s 2013 tax bill is $413,853. The previous year, the property assessment had increased 34 percent, following several years of near-zero increases.
In May, 2013, Appeal Tribunal judge Kent Rodgers ruled against Rank. The company is now appealing that ruling to the UARB, which has scheduled an April hearing.
Contacted Wednesday, Ramia said he didn’t even know there was an appeal. “We have consultants take care of all that,” he said.
