AS MUNICIPAL COUNCILS across Ontario struggle to prevent huge increases

in property taxes in an election year, they are no doubt more than a little concerned at the impact the most recent reassessment is going to have.

In Dufferin County, for instance, we learned last fall that residential property assessments were up by as much as 15 per cent in some areas, and even higher increases had resulted when it came to trying to set a current market value on individual properties, particularly in subdivisions that had become unusually attractive or had a lot of recent sales.

Theoretically, that shouldn't matter all that much, since if all properties were deemed to have risen in value by about 20 per cent, and the municipality and county or region kept their spending at about the previous year's level, everyone would be paying roughly the same amount in property taxes, assuming that the Province would not be demanding more from the education levy, its share of the property tax.

Of course, that's hardly what has been happening. In Orangeville, even a "zero budget" process has failed to keep the town's 2006 expenditures even close to last year's $14.8 million. Documents submitted to last Monday's budget session showed that even after chopping about $450,000 from the draft budget, proposed spending was still proposed at about $16.3 million - an increase of about 10 per cent.

Since the town has managed to attract some new assessment (albeit little in the form of new industrial assessment), an increase of about half that amount would mean that the "average" homeowner would wind up paying about the same amount to the town as he or she did in 2005. But if the spending hike stays in the vicinity of 10 per cent, our suspicion is that this same hypothetical taxpayer will pay significantly more for local municipal services, if not for county and education services.

But of one thing we're absolutely certain: because of the complexity of this taxation system, no one will obtain a proper understanding of why their tax bills are what they are.

And try as we might, we cannot find any justification for maintaining such a cumbersome - and expensive - assessment system.

After all, common sense surely tells us that property taxes should be based on the services required by the property owner.

When more services are demanded, taxes should go up, but otherwise they should increase only in line with the actual increase in the cost of providing them.

Sadly, that's not what happens under market value assessment or anything resembling it.

In fact, a well-kept house that's occupied by a widow or widower with no school-age children - who therefore puts little or no stress on education, road, water and sewer services, not to mention imposing demands on the police and fire services - actually gets a bigger tax bill than a neighbouring couple who happen to have several school-age children but live in a relatively unattractive house.

Even more ridiculously, it's our understanding that apartments in large buildings are actually taxed more heavily, relative to their market value, than other apartments and detached homes.

What really is needed is an end to assessments and the creation of a new form of property taxation, where taxes are based simply on the size of a property - not its appearance or quality in the eye of the beholder - and the local zoning.

Then, unless the property owner put on an addition to the house or was given more services, the tax bill would change in lock-step with the spending by the taxing authorities.

Instead of our current crop of highly paid assessors and review agencies, all we'd need is a local official with a tape measure.

But perhaps that makes too much sense.