Dear Mayor and Commissioners:
As you enter the budget deliberation season I would like you to consider giving yourself room for more upward movement in the Millage Rate than what is recommended by the Manager. Please have respect for that portion of the electorate that may want the opportunity to make a case for increased expenditures in the budget during the budget hearings. As you all are well aware, setting the maximum millage rate at a lower point than might ultimately be desired by residents before the public hearings in September, disenfranchises those that may wish for a better community at the cost of increased taxes. A mockery of the public hearing process is made by not giving yourselves and Village residents the flexibility to lobby for increased spending as well as additional reductions.
I am aware that some of you have made public commitments not to raise taxes, however a vote to allow a higher millage rate to go to the County will not violate that promise as you can honor your commitment in the votes that you make during the public hearing process. During the next and in future election cycles, I for one will remember those who show me and others respect by giving us the opportunity to have a meaningful voice in the budgetary process.
Sincerely,
Daniel Keys
So advises Dan Keys. Makes an interesting debate.
On the one hand: the Village needs money; residents have recently been given a considerable reduction in assessed value of their homes, and a doubling of the homestead exemption, so that some of us are paying less property tax than we did, for reasons that have nothing to do with the real value of our homes or our earning potential; others of us locked in such a low property tax, through homestead exemptions begun many years ago, that even with the lowered values and the double homestead exemption, we were so far behind current economics that our property taxes actually increased; under present economics, the Village operates on a shoestring, leaving us with miserable medians and no upgrades anywhere, unless someone decides to donate something. We have no other reliable way to raise revenue than by increasing the property tax. (See my "What's it Worth?," but I don't think it got any traction.) Property taxes result in half of what the Village lives on. Utility franchise fees provide an additional 1/3. The rest is small stuff and not reliable. So our choices are raise property taxes and/or franchise fees, or suffer reductions in services. We've done some of the latter. One area where there is more room to save is the police. This department is our single biggest expense, accounting for half of what we spend. We already underpay them, compared to other municipalities, and we have about two officers per shift. We can decide we don't want that much protection, and we can reduce salaries further and reduce the size of the force. It's most likely no one would work here for less than we're paying now. And no resident, even the most ardent complainers about taxes, has ever suggested having less police presence. So we may have backed ourselves into a corner. There is one other choice, which our Manager has begun. We can economize, streamline, and make more efficient. There's a certain amount of that that can happen, but it's limited. Once we cut what can be cut, fire who can be fired, and freeze wages, we're done. At that point, we're not doing what needs to be done to retain valued employees, and we make ourselves vulnerable to losing talent to someone else who will pay more. And we threaten the concept of reserve.
On the other hand, there are reasons not to increase taxes and the millage rate. The main reason is the obvious reason: the tax is higher. Most people don't want to pay a higher tax, and some can't afford to. There may be marginal homeowners who could pay property tax if it was 8.99 mills, but not if was 10 mills. Other reasons are less specific, and have to do with the image of a municipality where the tax rate suggests it is expensive to live. The idea is that prospective home buyers might shy away from a municipality that had a high tax rate. Then, there is the long term complication of stressing out homeowners. The central complication, which is active here and many other places now, is a high rate of foreclosures, which not only have a depressing effect on the neighborhood, but they don't provide any tax at all.
We are a unique, and functionally limited, neighborhood. We need money, as everyone does, and we have very few ways to get it. As a general theme, the people who choose to live here do so because they particularly like the character of the neighborhood. We used to function on more of a shoestring than we do now, and at that, we were temporarily mismanaged into the red. We're in the black now (I assume everyone would agree that's a good thing), and we have extra expenses. The Charter Review Committee, followed by the Commission at the time (5 or so years ago), gave us a new form of management, which required a professional Manager. This was a new and considerable expense. Our current Manager has worked very hard and well to keep us afloat, and she has gone out on a limb or two to do it. For example, she has frozen wages for all Village employees. This works well for us, in terms of preventing one area of increase of expenses, but it can't work too well for the employees. They can't go to Publix or anyplace else, say they work for VBP, and ask that prices remain fixed, because their income is. So at some point, we become a problem employer to them.
As for those who choose to live here, do we want to accommodate the most marginal among us, with the resulting implications for the neighborhood? We say, in Planning and Zoning and the Code Review Committee, that we want a respectable, if not high, level of style and maintenance, but we may be unlikely to get it if we hogtie ourselves in terms both of revenues and a level of property owner capacity. And if someone says he can't pay his tax at 10 mills, but only at 8.99, what will he do when his tax goes up every year anyway, by 3%?
So I think Dan Keys makes an interesting and potentially compelling argument. Nobody likes to pay taxes. Almost all of us can. We live in a specialized neighborhood, and most of us chose it because of its specialness. I've mentioned this example before, but I used to live in the Town of Brookline, Massachusetts. The Town prided itself on it's schools. In Massachusetts, the schools are run by the municipality, not the County or the Commonwealth. And there were statutes, like there are here, limiting the municipality's ability to increase property taxes, unless the municipality overrode the limitation. Brookline always voted, by referendum, to override, because it wanted good schools. The residents of the Town understood that it was on them, and for their benefit, to support the schools to the level they wanted them, and they voted to pay higher taxes to do it. It was important to them.
So if our lifestyle is important to us, we have to consider Dan's proposal. And we're not talking about overriding a ceiling. We're not even at the ceiling. That's Dan's point. If we keep doing what we're doing, we will at some point lose our police or shrink the force, we will lose our employees, and we will probably lose our Manager soon enough anyway. Almost anybody will pay her more than we do. And this is all for the sake of money that we'll all pay some day anyway. For a frame of reference, if a property is assessed at $350K, and $50K are exempted (homestead), the difference between a millage of 8.99 and 10 is about $300 per year.
Not to be heartless to our most limited neighbors, perhaps we could agree that if we do tax properties beyond what some neighbors can actually afford, they can apply to us for relief. Maybe our Manager and Finance Director could review applications and tax returns to see if a certain neighbor really can't afford an increase, and we can make an exception for that occasional neighbor.
Food for thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment