High River council has set the 2017 Municipal Tax Rate.

At Tuesday's meeting council decided to go with a 2.9 per cent increase overall, with one percent of that to cover inflation.

Mayor Craig Snodgrass is completely happy with it.

"For a couple of reasons, number one it meets our budget obligations, because we always have to continue to provide the service and the quality of our service for our residents and businesses," he says "And number two, because it meets our reserve amounts that we want to continue to put away so that we have money for future projects that come up that we may not have funding for.

He says since this council was elected in 2013 they've managed to put aside over $5 million in reserves.

"These municipalities, especially in an election year, you can try to get into being tax heroes and you're doing a complete disservice to your community when you're doing that because at some point in time you've got to make it up," he says.

Council debated and asked a lot of questions of administration about the comparative residential to non-residential tax rates. The 2.9 per cent increase includes 1 per cent for inflation. Of the 1.9 per cent that's left residential rate payers will hand over 0.9 per cent more while commercial and industrial ratepayers are hit with an increase of 6.3 per cent.

Council went with a 1 to 1.225 ratio of residential to non-residential, up from the 2016 rate of 1 to 1.2.

Councillor Emile Blokland thought the 6.3 per cent hike on the non-residential side was too high.

Mayor Snodgrass didn't have an issue with it.

"We used to be at 1 to 1.1 when this council started which is far too low and we are still too low, we are not up to many of our competitive neighbours," he says. "High River still has, at this ratio, is still a very, very competitive community for the commercial industry."

In the end council voted unanimously to approve the tax rate bylaw.