Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I wanted to raise some general comments on a couple of issues. The first one being the new lease rates in the communities. It has been brought to my attention by the community of Enterprise, and more so from the community of Fort Providence. The new rates do not seem to reflect fairness and probably are going to be unaffordable to a lot of people.
The properties in Fort Providence, for example, were rated at $1,700 about four or five years ago. To date, because of the lease only policy, in order to lease these properties now, we are probably looking at 14 times more to lease it than if you were to buy it.
The old rate was $350 a year. Over a 20-year period, that would have come out to approximately $7,000. With the new rate of roughly $2,300 a year from the letters I received from Fort Providence, you are looking at the same property being $46,000. There is a huge increase in the rates. I think it should be taken into consideration that the assessment, which my understanding is supposed to involve physical visits and consultation with the property owners, has not happened. I am not satisfied that the whole process was done fairly.
Also for consideration, we should be looking at the smaller communities that do not have the services the larger centres have and should not be rolled under the same factors. There is a very great concern that a lot of people may have to move. We do not have high wage earners in the community, for the most part. We do not have the double-income families that most of the communities like Fort Smith and Yellowknife have.
It is becoming increasingly costly to live in the communities. There is a real migration trend to the larger centres as it is, and this is even making it escalate. That is one concern.
My second concern is the new formula financing that has been presented to the communities. From the outset, it looks like it is very good. We are providing funds to the community. Block funding is something the communities have been asking for for many years. However, when you start to look at it very closely and you start looking at the numbers, you see what is not included as part of the block funding. It does not look as pretty as it was initially presented.
For example, in Enterprise, we are looking at a number of things that were not calculated into the formula. Some funding that they used to get under community development, under minor capital, some recreation dollars, and land development planning, those numbers total to roughly $60,000 a year. You start adding that on a three-year basis over the next three years, that is $180,000 cut out of the budget automatically.
In the case of Enterprise, and because of the factors that are used to determine the dollars that are allocated to the community, infrastructure is one of the three factors. In the community of Enterprise, they have a weigh scale. A weigh scale that was put in the community without really acknowledging any discussion from the mayor or council. Nobody from the community works at the weigh scale. It really has no connection to the community.
It is the same thing with the highways setup that is located in Enterprise. All of the employees are from Hay River. However, these buildings and this infrastructure were calculated into the formula. It has caused the dollars that are presently allocated, which is about $250,000, to be reduced annually to roughly $220,000 over the next three years.
If you add all of the small program dollars that we are getting that we will no longer get, we are looking in the hundreds of thousands of dollars that we are losing. It is a real concern. They no longer can plan for anything constructive over the next while. They will just be trying to hang on to what they have, if they can do that. The services are probably going to diminish. They are already having problems, even with simple things such as snow removal. We start taking away that kind of dollars, we are really going to be seeing them in trouble.
Those things I wanted to raise with the Minister. I am hoping he will respond to those two issues. Thank you.