AJC: DeKalb May Raise Taxes By 4 Mills as Property Values Decline
Decatur Metro | May 25, 2011Yikes…
DeKalb County may have to raise property taxes higher than expected after new calculations revealed Tuesday show property values have plunged even more than anticipated.
The 13-percent drop in property values translates into an estimated $40 million shortfall in the 2011 budget –- and what some county commissioners say could lead to a 4-mil tax hike this summer. The drop in the county’s assessed value, down to $20.8 billion, had been projected last week to be about 10.5 percent.
But commissioners, who have the final say on the budget, say they won’t approve any tax increase unless the CEO Burrell Ellis offers up more cuts.
My casual calculations, based on the formulas in this Decatur Tax Blog post, seem to show that a 4 mill increase on a $275,000 house would result in an annual property tax increase of around $400. Throw in the roughly $120 DECREASE Decatur residents will soon see on their DeKalb taxes due to the elimination of long-running “double-taxation”, and it’s possible that the $1,600 tax difference between the two municipalities on a $275,000 home could be reduced to at least a $1,200 difference (if you assume the DeKalb mill increase wipes out the “no-more-double-taxation” drop for Decatur residents).
Decatur’s taxes may still be higher, but they certainly seem a bit more sustainable than those in DeKalb. How much more expensive must DeKalb get before annexation requests come flooding in?
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I especially love how Channel 2 has been running stories about the Dekalb commissioners running up 2000.00 catering tabs every time they have meetings and how the water department won’t collect on past due bills. There is a LOT of fat to cut before we need to start talking about a 4 mill increase. Dekalb government needs to step up and feel a little bit of the pain that the citizens of Dekalb have been experiencing for some time now. They certainly aren’t spending the money fixing the potholes in Dekalb!
I’m still sort of shocked about DeKalb’s twice a week trash pick up.
Twice a week trash, once a week recycling and once a week landscape trimmings. County trucks come to my curb almost every day.
But those are not expenses that come out of general tax revenues.
They aren’t?
Well sort of. The payment is made for this service as part of your tax bill, but it is a line item expense which is not affected by millage rate adjustments. If they cut back to one day trash per week (which I think they should do), and reduced the cost accordingly for this service, it would not relieve the tax shortfall one cent.
Curbside Recycling is an opt-in service and has nothing to do with taxes.
Nope, they aren’t. You do have to pay for trash and trimmings pick up, but I don’t think you have to pay for recycling pick-up as you can simply not opt in for it. That was the way it was initially presented, I don’t know if that’s changed.
But such pick up is a great thing AFAIC. I get direct value from those expenditures.
Dekalb Co. Recycling is a one time $15 fee for the bin, and $15 per box of heavy-duty recycling bags.
Just Google “Dekalb County pay raises” to get a sample of how little the DeKalb Co brass cares about spending your money wisely. Just a taste here: http://www.cbsatlanta.com/news/27043784/detail.html. The County is a giant jobs program. The 4 mils are “needed” because, in their minds, we work for them, they don’t work for us. The school system, while separate, is even worse.
Here’s another thing maybe someone can explain. I tried to research the last decade or so of DeKalb Co property tax receipts to see just how much revenue the county has been collecting over time. The County’s budget books (available online) have one set of historical figures until 2010, but then the 2010 budget book has much lower figures for property tax collections from 2006 forward. How is that possible? They revised actual collections downward years after the fact? I am going to look into this further but absent a compelling explanation, I do not trust their numbers.
If you go by the pre-2010 numbers, it illustrates just how profligate the county must have been to end up in a huge crunch with no reserve. Property tax receipts (about 45% of total revenue) went from $203 million in 2002 to $306 million in 2008 — that is a staggering increase in just six years. And yet they’re now here to tell us that the current problems just can’t be solved through expenses, and they’ve got to generate more revenue by increasing the rate of taxation on assets that are falling in value.
Do what you will, Dekalb. Just remeber that at some point, people will start voting with their feet.
The AJC reported on a GSU study conducted last year that recommended DeKalb could eliminate 909 staff positions: http://www.ajc.com/news/dekalb/too-much-staff-in-512225.html.
Good article, but those AJC editors don’t understand punctuation. It’s shouldn’t be “Too Much Staff in Dekalb County?” “Too Much Staff in Dekalb County!” would be more correct.
By the way, is this an actual interview with one of the 25 Burrell Ellis staffers?
At least they capped the K in DeKalb. When I applied for my first proofreading job, that danged K sank my battleship
.
I will be interested in what you come up with. That is not sarcasm – truly interested.
Just letting you know that your digging efforts won’t be for nothing.
OK, I’ve already spent way too much time on this, but here is what I think I have found:
In the 2010 budget they suddenly took a huge portion of what had always been considered property taxes and threw it into a category simply described as “Other.” This amounts to roughly $50 million/year. They did not disclose this change very well in the budget book, so you have to read closely to find it and compare the books year over year. They don’t explain why they made this change. Or at least, I can’t find the explanation if they did offer one.
The end result is that using their data to make year over year comparsions is very difficult. The total revenue numbers appear to be consistent, but the way they break it up is not consistent at all. So when they are talking about property taxes, it’s hard to know exactly what they mean, since they appear to have changed the definition quite a bit from 2009 to 2010, and presumably beyond that.
I don’t really know if this has any real implications for the current debate about millage rates. But I will tell you that it does make it pretty hard for your average citizen to get a grasp on what the county is collecting and from what sources. Perhaps that is intentional. Perhaps not.
Awesome clip Dem!
Regarding plunging property values, has anyone in the City of Decatur experienced lower Fair Market Values from the DeKalb County Assessor? I know I haven’t.
I did have my home re-evaluated this year and it was approved. It was previously valued at over $150,000 above any other comp property in my area. Mind you, this took a 13 month battle and an attorney! But it was finally reduced to my purchase price.
Ditto on the clip, thanks for posting DEM. BTW, many many of us are in “pay freeze” mode in this climate. We may deserve pay and merit increases, but we ain’t getting them. I work “for the state” (ok, no wisecracks!) and we haven’t seen a pay raise in more than two years, not even a cost of living raise. So the county needs to wait on these promotions. This is yet another bad publicity move for Burrell Ellis.
The state has done a much better job than DeKalb Co on belt-tightening, and unfortunately for many, pay freezes or cuts have been part of that. It is a clear failure of leadership for DeKalb to freeze or cut pay for some — especially when those folks seem to be core government service like police and fire — while central office functionaries get not just raises, but huge raises. This at a time when we have 9% unemployment nationwide, and even pratice sector employees have had pay cuts, layoffs, the whole nine yards.
Ellis needs to go, and so do many commissioners. How they let the county’s finances get to this stage is hard to explain and, in any event, inexcusable. It will be worse still if they ram through this very large tax increase.
I still haven’t figured out why the budget book numbers don’t jibe. Yet another mystery in the mismanagement of our county, especially since they are paying so many people so much money to get this stuff right. Sigh.
DEM,
We’re going to need your real name so we know who to vote for in the next DeKalb County CEO election. I can’t order my yard sign from cafepress.com until I know.
Looking forward to reading the budget numbers once you track them down. Then again, maybe I’m NOT looking forward to it…
Yours would be the only vote I would receive, DTR.
Count me in, too, DEM. But I’ll require an outrageously lucrative consulting contract.
LIBERATE DECATUR!
oh man, if Decatur could leave DeKalb county and have all of the DeKalb offices moved outside of the city, i’d be in heaven!