They say the only things that are inevitable are death and taxes. While, local residents can look forward to more of the latter soon.Council is looking at increasing taxes to residents and businesses in Grand Forks in the upcoming 2014 tax rates bylaw.At the regular council meeting of April 28, council heard three different options for the upcoming tax rate, bylaw 1997. Council then voted for the first three readings of their favourite option at a special meeting on May 5.Council was originally supposed to vote on the first three readings of the tax rate bylaw on April 28 but the City was still waiting for the revised B.C. assessment role.At that meeting, Chief financial officer Roxanne Shepherd presented council with three different options on setting the upcoming tax rate for the city.“It’s always really interesting – we are waiting for the revised (assessment) roles which comes out the last week of April,” said Shepherd. “We are also waiting for the regional hospital district to do their rates before we do our bylaw. Our bylaw (for the tax rate) is due by May 15 so we always have a real small time period to get this done.”Shepherd told council that staff would have preferred to introduce the new tax rate bylaw to the committee of the whole but time would not permit that option.The three options including: a 2 per cent tax hike across the board; a 2 per cent increase with a reduced tax rate for heavy industry with an increase to residential or commercial; or no increase at all, which would have made put the city a revenue shortfall of $65,753 for the year.In the tax rate bylaw report to council, Shepherd said, “The community charter requires that each municipality approve a tax rates bylaw no later than May 15 for the current year. The tax rates bylaw authorizes the City to collect property taxes for the year. The tax rates bylaw levies rates for municipal, region district and hospital purchases for each year.”At the special meeting on the tax rate bylaw on Monday, council approved the first three readings of the bylaw with the first option – a two per cent tax rate increase for all.“There was some well thought out debate on options one and two,” said councellor Bob Kendel. “The majority of council opted for option number one which was an equal tax increase for everyone. The consensus is that we’ve only got a couple of real heavy industries in town and they’re both doing well at the moment. We didn’t feel it was prudent at this time to change that.”Kendel added that the amount the industries (Roxul and Interfor) would have saved (approximately $30,000) was not a significant amount.“We just didn’t think the burden should be shifted from those guys to residential or commercial,” he said.Final reading for the tax rate bylaw is expected to be at the regular council meeting on May 12.Option 1:(dollars of tax per $1,000 taxable assessed value)Residential - general municipal = 3.8989; West Kootenay Boundary regional hospital district = 0.2912; Kootenay Boundary regional hospital district = (0.0067); and Regional District of Kootenay Boundary = 2.2502. Utility = 38.6771Major industry = 43.3948Light industry = 11.4238Business/other = 9.3184Rec/non-profit = 3.1191Farm = 4.2108Option 2 would have seen the major industry tax rate drop to 41.5874 for general municipal.Option 3 would have seen the residential tax rate for general municipal at 3.8105.