Assessments are up in the Municipality of North Norfolk.

Mayor Neil Christoffersen says the Manitoba Assessment Branch stopped by their most recent council meetings and delivered the news.

"Based on their calculations and investigations they advised us that the total taxable assessment in North Norfolk went up by 8.1 per cent. Residential went down about 6.5 per cent while farm property went up about 25 per cent. Commercial went up about 10 per cent, pipelines went down a little bit, and railways went up about 4 per cent. The biggest one is the farm at 25 per cent, you put that all together and it averages out to be about an 8.1 percent increase overall."

Christoffersen says ever since land prices have started to escalate the farmers have been shouldering more of the tax increases.

"That's what it sounds like unless we can come up with some other plan, but this has been investigated and talked about, and no one has come up with a fair, equitable, solution. You have to have a certain amount of dollars to run the municipality and if it doesn't come from somewhere it's going to come from somewhere else."

He says it's the same sort of struggle in other municipalities across the province.