This truly has been the toughest tax season in my experience as county treasurer. The effects of inflation on our everyday items, gas to get to work, rents and more have just continued to rise. Now, so have taxes. Our assessments of our homes, homes that some of us have lived in for more than 20 years, have skyrocketed during the last reappraisal cycle.
Higher assessments lead most government agencies to lower the mills so as not to collect more money than needed for their annual budgets. In fact, county governments are limited by an inflation factor in creating annual budgets. Our County Commissioners have tried very hard to get our budget down to manageable levels and still give our agencies enough money to pay our team members and do business. I can’t tell you how hard this is. They even went so far as to lower budget requests where they could.
Like all counties, the state is required to do a calculation, based on property assessments, of the mills needed for school equalization — a mechanism that is meant to ensure that all students have access to a quality education. The calculation it arrived at this year was 77.89 mills. This conclusion supported our belief that counties should lower the state mills from 95 to 77.90.
