St. Albert could save thousands if enough ratepayers opt in to e-bills and out of paper tax assessment notices next year.
In 2025 the city plans to offer emailed pdf versions of combined tax assessment notices, according to Stephen Bannerman, St. Albert’s city assessor.
He said Tuesday, Nov. 12 Alberta changed the Municipal Government Act in 2019 to allow for those notices, 30,000 of which St. Albert mails out annually, to be delivered electronically.
There’s a suite of benefits to the taxpayer that comes with this, according to Bannerman’s report, which is available on St. Albert’s website, including that its faster, reduces paper waste, reduces clutter and makes storing and retrieving notices easier.
Benefits to the city include savings of postage, which are easy to quantify at $1.06 an envelope, and administrative time, which is less so, Bannerman said.
“I would assume that … those costs are substantially higher” when considering the work that staff put in to preparing each notice.
Residents will have to opt in, and it’s voluntary: The city likes the paperless option, but you can still get a traditional physical copy if you prefer. Just do nothing.
“Through the City of St. Albert web portal MyCity, property owners will have the option to “opt-in” for electronic delivery of their property assessment notice,” according to Bannerman’s report. “This service may be familiar to those already using MyCity for their utility bills.
“An assessed person will be required to log in with their individual username/password and select the option for Electronic Mailing of Assessment Notices.
“In the fourth week of May 2025 property owners will receive an email that their combined Assessment and Tax Notice is available for viewing through the portal.”
The notice contains details such as property identifiers, assessment information, tax rates, tax calculations, pre-authorized program details, and appeal information, as usual.
Bannerman said a lot of this information is available through the portal currently, but in that format doesn’t meet the legislative requirement to be considered a secure electronic version of the paper tax bill in the eyes of the all-powerful MGA.
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He also said if you opt in to the e-bills and get cold feet, that’s OK, too: You can change your preferences through the online portal and ask to receive paper bills again.
The city’s tax software is called Tempest and staff will be working to update it toward the end of the calendar year, then running tests.
The savings to the city would be meagre at first and handily offset by the cost of the software update ($22,000 up front and $2,000 annually thereafter).
According to Bannerman’s math, and Bannerman seemed like a “math” kind of guy, the city could save between $1,500 and $6,000 in the first year. That’s based on the eight-to-20 per cent of ratepayers who have taken up electronic bills in other municipalities St. Albert looked at, and the $30,500 or so it cost to mail out 28,800 combined notices for the 2023 tax year.
“The methodology is relatively new, and higher uptakes will take time.”
Councillors including Wes Brodhead and Shelley Biermanski were less than impressed with the projected savings.
“I was a little surprised by the uptake numbers,” Brodhead said. “Do you have a strategy to sort of move people over?”
Bannerman said other municipalities that provided St. Albert with that eight-to-20 per cent uptake rate didn’t give a “firm answer” in terms of why it wasn’t more popular. They did note that since the tax notices only go out once a year, there’s a limited opportunity to get across to ratepayers that they could make the quantum leap to e-bills.
He said internally, the finance department set a goal of 10 per cent uptake, because that would roughly cover the costs of the change.
Coun. Brodhead asked whether there is a legal reason preventing the city from charging ratepayers for a paper copy as some private companies now do; Coun. Biermanski on the flip side asked whether there was any guarantee in the new policy that residents would not be forced to pay a fee to remain among the humble papered.
“I’m unaware of any municipality that charges for assessment tax notices as a service,” Bannerman said. “What we’re looking at is the reduction in cost to provide those services.”
