Jenny and The Debts’ Magic Money Tax Hike
I swear it’d be easier dealing with back alley loan sharks than with the board of commissioners’ tax-and-spend majority. At least loan sharks are upfront about their money grabs.
Not so much Commissioners Chairman Jennifer Roberts, last seen trying once again to convince folks that just because they might end up paying more in property taxes this year, their property taxes aren’t going up.
If the county keeps its current tax rate – a prospect for which Roberts has minted the term “rate neutral” – the revaluation money train is likely to fill county coffers with upwards of $70 million in additional revenues, straight from your pockets.
But because the tax rate would remain static, according to Roberts, you wouldn’t actually be paying more taxes, even though most folks would be paying on average 30 percent or more on their higher property values based on revaluation. But that extra money is special magic money, not real money, according to Roberts and her theory of rate neutrality.
Asked to speak on the issue, Roberts said keeping last year’s tax rate would yield $50 million to $70 million in new money. She said the money could be used for CMS or to finance other county priorities.
Commissioners, who have final approval over the CMS budget, will vote in June. Roberts indicated she supports using the revaluation to funnel more dollars to CMS.
“You don’t have to lobby me,” she told the group.
“In a revaluation year, keeping the tax rate the same is not a tax increase,” she told the group.
Got that? Even though a majority of taxpayers would be paying more, it wouldn’t be a tax increase. It would be, um, something different.
When all is said and done, though, even the board’s Democrat majority of Jenny and The Debts will likely drop the rate-neutral pretense and actually agree to cut the tax rate.
They’ll do so because even a fairly significant cut, upwards of double digits, wouldn’t produce a revenue neutral budget, based on the projected jackpot that revaluation will yield. It would instead still leave the county with millions of dollars more in its coffers, and homeowners that got spanked by revaluation would still end up paying more, even with a tax cut.
The county board’s Democrat majority has indicated it wants at least an extra $40 million for CMS and the libraries so use that as your baseline. Any tax rate the commissioners set above revenue neutral, perhaps even revenue negative, will mean a tax increase for a majority of residents, despite Roberts’s claims to the contrary.
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