We have spoken to three individual Real Estate brokers about this. The consensus is that a zoning change from Agricultural to "Natural Environment" will devalue your property between 70% to 85%.

 Example 1: Current listing price of a building lot with some bush and some open areas is $899,000.00. If the "Natural Environment" zoning is applied as the county wants to, there will be no available building lot location on the property. The estimated value would drop to $150,000.00 – an 84% drop in value. The real estate broker went on to say: “In Chatham, they are allowed to clear cut property to make way for additional farming operations. Here, they want to attack farmers and take away the ability to clear fence lines, take away potential building lots, etc.”

Example 2: A farmer has not had a chance to maintain their fence lines. Perhaps this fence line was identified as a "Natural Area". The county might not have informed the owner of this “Natural Area” designation or the farmer didn't understand that this will result in re-zoning of this fence line to "Natural Environment". This means that they can re-zone land without the owner even knowing! 

Example 3: A farmer, being a good stewart of the land, planted trees along his laneway. This area is now (possibley mistakenly) been identified as "Natural Area". Had he not found out about this, the passing of the new Official Plan would have changed the zoning of this land to "Natural Enviroment". We have had  many, many farmers telling us that "they will never plant another tree on thier property". 

This plan (re-zoning) could cost ALL landowners in the county HIGHER land taxes! 

The Ministry of Natural Resources has a tax rebate plan for managed forests. In summary, if you have a bush lot that is managed with a plan, you are given a 75% reduction in your land tax.

Sounds good, right?

Yes, for the person that has the bush lot, but not the rest of the landowners in the county.

How does this work?

Let’s use a hypothetical scenario of farmer “A” that has 100 acres. Of this, he has a bush lot (zoned NRE2) that is 20 acres. His total tax bill for the year is $10,000.00. He applies to the MNR for his tax rebate for the tax he has paid on the 20-acre bush lot. He gets a reduction of 75% on the taxes paid on the bush lot, lets say that this amount is $1000.00.

So far, so good!

However, the tax is not paid by the Ministry of Natural Resources, it is a reduction of the taxes collected by Perth County!

Let’s do the math:

The total land area that Perth County wants to designate “Natural Area” (and will be re-zoned to "Natural Environment") is approximately 10,000 acres.

Lets say, that of these 10,000 acres, farmers are able to claim 7,000 acres as managed bush lots. That’s 7,000 acres LESS land that the county will be collecting tax on. The township was not able to give me a tax rate of a acre of agricultural land, but lets say it is $100.00.

If 7,000 acres is now not taxable multiplied by $100.00 per acre times the 75% tax reduction, that means that the County now has $525,000 LESS Income.

Where does the $525,000 come from? Do you think that the politicians will take a pay cut? NO… they will raise the tax rates on the rest of the properties in the county to make up this difference. EVEN residential properties could see a tax increase to make up for this overall reduction in income!


Natural Environement Zoning = Could result in higher taxes for everyone!