Has the City-Rural Tax Base and Land-Use Balance Changed in Alberta? Explorations into the Distribution of Equalized Property Assessments Among Municipality Classes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alberta ended its regional planning commissions in 1996. They were replaced by voluntary inter-municipal negotiation, but this has raised concerns about adverse effects on land use. Pressure to terminate the commissions came largely from the rural municipalities. Some of them felt the commissions retarded their economic development. They believed that in a less restrictive planning environment, they would be able to attract a greater share of development, especially business. This study assesses the consequences of that change. Alberta’s rapid growth over much of the post-1995 period affords an exceptional opportunity to search for noticeable changes in the urban-rural tax base and land-use patterns and balance. Municipal tax base is measured, and land use reflected, by property values. Those values are taken to be the provincially determined equalized assessments used for property tax purposes. Fortunately, these provide a reliable and consistent measure of property values across municipalities and over time for properties of different kinds. For the types of properties of prime interest for this analysis, residential and unregulated business property, equalized assessments approximate 100 per cent of market value. Residential property represents over 60 per cent of total provincial equalized assessments and business property about 20 per cent. In cities, the percentages are 70 per cent and 24 per cent; residential and business properties represent almost all the taxable property. The focus of the analysis is whether, during the past two decades, the shares of residential and/or business property have shifted from cities to rural municipalities. The possibility of shifting city-rural tax base/land-use patterns is explored from four perspectives. This report examines trends in the distribution of residential and business equalized assessments among the types of municipalities in the province. To obtain a better perspective in specific cases, the city-rural split of assessments is reported for the Edmonton and Calgary metropolitan areas and nine cities between 1997 and 2014. Examining the movements in the ratios of business to residential assessments of 31 city and rural municipalities provides further insight. The final approach is to simply review changes in the location of population and dwellings between cities and rural areas. There has been no notable or general shift of land development away from cities and to rural areas. Despite the rapid growth and the devolved planning environment, the cityversus-rural distribution of tax base and land use has, overall, been remarkably constant although development was definitely not uniform across Alberta cities. If anything, the cities’ shares of residential development may have increased while their shares of business development have been more uneven. For both types of property, however, the development patterns have varied across both city and rural municipalities. Concern that the changed planning environment might have shifted property development towards the rural municipalities does not appear to have been justified. Whether this development met other planning criteria is not explored here. This analysis encourages more detailed investigations using alternative indicators.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".