February 2021
Introducing the new Municipal Connect
We’ve begun the rollout of our new version of Municipal Connect, MPAC’s data-sharing platform for municipal staff. The new system responds to the changing needs of municipalities and significantly improves both functionality and user experience, while implementing the highest security standards.
 
“The new Municipal Connect is a refreshingly vast tool kit of property assessment data made available to municipalities in order to deal with the growing complexities of property tax administration. The data exchange portal provides for customer service level improvements. A welcome upgrade to transparency and collaboration in municipal taxation matters. Kudos!” –Kim Villeneuve, Manager, Taxation Services, City of Oshawa.
 
Municipalities will continue to move to the new system one zone at a time over the next few weeks. In April and May, provincial government, school board users and municipal consultants will transition to the new system.

To see a live demo of the new Municipal Connect, watch the recording of our January municipal webinar. If you are a user with questions about the transition, contact your local Account Support Coordinator.
Virtual Day with MPAC
Each year, our offices in Central Ontario would typically hold a series of “Days with MPAC” within each region in Zone 5. With the restrictions in place due to COVID-19, this year looked a bit different – by going virtual instead.
 
Over the course of two weeks, members of MPAC’s Municipal and Stakeholder Relations and Valuation and Customer Relations teams hosted a series of webinars attended by more than 340 municipal staff, covering topics including electronic building plans and permits, Assessment Kiosk and Access to Online Assessment Roll Information, the new Municipal Connect and more.
Continuing to share our story
This month we held our first webinar with Members of Provincial Parliament (MPP) from the PC Caucus to discuss our role, the work we do and ways we can support MPPs in responding to property owners with questions about property assessment and taxation.

MPAC’s Board Chair, Alan Spacek, Nicole McNeill, President and Chief Administrative Officer and Carmelo Lipsi, Vice-President and Chief Operating Officer led the engaging discussion where MPPs were able to ask questions about how we assess properties. Stay tuned for more updates as our outreach to MPPs continues later this month.
Upcoming webinar
Modernization Opportunities for Ontario’s Building Permit Process

One of the most important things MPAC does is transform new development and building construction into assessment that provides taxation revenue – it’s a critical part of our daily work to support Ontario municipalities.
 
A key ingredient in this work is the collection of building permit and plan information. How this information is gathered and the speed at which it can be collected, impacts how fast MPAC can deliver new assessment and revenue to its municipal partners.
 
With the pandemic, MPAC had to work with municipalities to adapt how we collect this important information. We launched an online portal for the collection of building plans, supported some municipalities in their adoption of new e-permitting software, and worked to identify new ways to support the modernization of the building permit process.
 
Join Mary Dawson-Cole, Regional Manager, who will discuss some of MPAC’s learnings during the pandemic, insights we’ve gathered from our building permit data, and a number of the initiatives we are exploring to support municipalities and the Province in the modernization of the building permit process.
 
There will be time for your ideas and questions.
Date: Thursday, March 4
Time: 1 to 2 p.m. EDT
View the schedule of upcoming municipal webinars on mpac.ca and view recordings of all past webinars on our YouTube channel.
Last fall, MPAC worked with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food & Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) and Agricorp to co-host a webinar on the Farm Property Class Tax Rate Program that sparked a solution for a property owner’s unique situation in the Municipality of Chatham-Kent.
 
The webinar prompted Chatham-Kent to reach out to MPAC for help in solving an issue brought to their attention by a property owner two months prior. The property owner noted that they had received confirmation of approval for the farm tax class to be applied to their property for the 2017 taxation year, but the change had not been processed.
 
While the documentation was from OMAFRA, MPAC and the municipality didn’t have records of the approval or adjustment for the 2017 taxation year. Since the program administration moved to Agricorp in 2019, continuing this conversation with all those involved helped identify the missing piece, and resulted in a review and approval from Agricorp.
 
“Attending MPAC’s webinar with OMAFRA and Agricorp opened the door for us to raise our issue with our MPAC Account Manager, and she helped us with the steps to resolve the issue by working with us and Agricorp to review the file and obtain the documentation we were missing,” said Amy McLellan, Manager, Revenue, Municipality of Chatham Kent.

Do you have a suggestion for a collaborative information session? Share it with us.