A $1.3 million dollar mixed-use building project for 35 Main Street will be the first project to receive an incentive in the form of a tax rebate from the new town of Tantramar, based on a policy passed in Sackville in March 2020.
A Moncton-based dental surgeon has plans for the vacant lot just uphill from Sackville town hall. Daniel Nachaat is listed as the director of the numbered company that bought the vacant property in 2021. This year, Nachaat’s company applied to the town’s economic development incentive program with a proposal for a three-storey development including a ground floor dental clinic, and two upper floors with a total of eight one-bedroom apartments.
The project is being managed by Dieppe-based real estate investment company Quest Capital and is the first ever development to apply for and be approved under the new incentive program, which offers property owners a 50% or more tax rebate over 5 or 10 years, for commercial, industrial or multi-unit residential projects.
The Quest Properties project is estimated at costing $1.3 million, and without the incentive program, would bring in an additional $25,000 per year in taxes for the municipality. With the incentive program in place, more than half of that potential tax revenue, about $72,000 over the first five years, will stay with Nachaat’s company. The municipality will still collect about $52,000 in taxes during that time. Despite the deep discount, the revenue will be significantly higher than what Nachaat currently pays on the vacant property, which is under $900 per year.
Tantramar’s Director of Corporate and Community Services, Kieran Miller, says the incentive program is based on similar ones in Moncton and Riverview. “We’re obviously a different scale,” says Miller. “They’re seeing significantly higher and larger scale developments. But we did use them as a guide when developing our program.“
Miller says the intent is “to create opportunities and accelerate investment in specific areas of the community where new growth and redevelopment can be accommodated, and where we’re really hoping to see development.” The program applies to all properties zoned Mixed Use, urban residential 3 (R3), industrial, and highway commercial.
Miller says the hope is that the grants act as a “catalyst for increased development activities, and then that in turn can help attract other types of businesses, new residents and new employment opportunities.”
Currently the program only applies to properties in the former town of Sackville, but Miller says, “it’s something we could certainly look at expanding as we get our different plans and bylaws and policies in order.”
Nachaat is the first developer to apply for the incentive since it was passed in 2020, but Miller attributes that lack of interest to the pandemic slowdown. Another recent major development—the pipe factory built by AIL Group on Walker Road—would have been a candidate for the incentive, but did not apply. And town staff recently received an application from JN Lafford regarding their proposed development at 131 Main Street. The details of that application will come before council on Tuesday at the Tantramar council committee of the whole meeting, scheduled for 3pm.
