Billion-dollar lumber sales barely budge N.B. sawmill assessments
CBC
New Brunswick sawmills that won property assessment and tax concessions in 2014 and 2015 to help cope with poor lumber markets are still benefiting from the discounts even though lumber markets roared to all-time highs this year and mills have been piling up record revenues.
In 2019, at hearings looking at industrial property taxes in New Brunswick, MLAs were told manufacturing properties that received assessment discounts because of weak markets could expect increases if business recovered.
"If the market factors indicate that things are coming back or that the supply and demand situation is more favourable, then we will definitely have to take that into consideration in our assessments," said Steve Ward, who was Service New Brunswick's director of property assessment at the time.
Lumber markets have more than recovered from the weaknesses of several years ago but so far that appears to have had little effect on the province's valuation of lumber mills.
Last week, New Brunswick's largest sawmill, J.D. Irving Ltd.'s mill in Grande-Rivière outside Saint-Léonard, received notice of a one per cent property assessment increase for 2022, its first increase in seven years. That will raise the valuation of the mill for property taxes to $12.6 million.
The amount is $1.1 million below what the the sawmill was valued at in 2013 before the province awarded it an 11 per cent assessment reduction because of weak lumber markets.
On Friday, Service New Brunswick was not able to immediately explain why strong lumber prices over the last 15 months have not caused lingering assessment discounts at sawmills to be clawed back.
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