FROM THE PUBLISHER | Your big property tax increase, and how it could be avoided

The fact that it’s a titanic struggle for The Mercury — on your behalf — to figure out what each budget proposal would mean for the property tax bill of a typical homeowner tells you a lot. What it tells you is that that number is not something the government is really interested in measuring, or at least putting forward for public consumption. That is, in my humble opinion, the problem.

Local government boards — the Manhattan City Commission, the Riley County Commission and the Manhattan-Ogden school board — are nearing the end of their annual budget process. Nothing is yet set in stone, but unless something changes, they’re on a path for a double-digit increase in the property tax bill of the owner of a typical home. That’s driven by the fact that property appraisals here went up by 13 percent this year. They would have to lower the tax rate by a corresponding amount in order to keep bills the same, and they’re just not doing that.

The government is subject to the same pressures as other businesses, and so they have to pay more for materials, and employees need a raise to keep up with inflation. Nobody really questions that. The budget’s going to go up.

The problem is that taxpayers are going to get hit with a major increase in their bills, far bigger than the current rate of inflation. Yes, homeowners are likely to get a big payoff when they sell their homes because of rising values, but most people can’t just do that willy-nilly so as to cash in on rising appraisals.

So in the meantime, they just have to cough up more in property taxes.

Local elected officials know this, of course, and yet they haven’t been able to slow the train. It’s not entirely their fault, either — some of what local government has to pay for has been dumped upon them by the state and/or federal government. I need to note here that the extra hoop to jump through — the state-mandated rule that these boards now have to officially vote to exceed the “revenue-neutral rate” of taxation — hasn’t done any good. In fact, it’s just made the problem worse, since the government now has to send out notices in the mail about this; that’s tens of thousands of dollars down the tubes. It was a dumb idea from the outset, as we’ve said here for quite some time.

What would help, in my humble opinion, is a change in mindset. Rather than fight us, they ought to adopt the approach The Mercury attempts to use in all its stories — cut through all the blather and figure out what the percentage increase in the typical homeowner’s property taxes will be, assuming the average increase in the appraisal of an existing single-family home. Decide what that number ought to be, and work backward from there — rather than deciding how much needs to be spent, and then setting a tax rate, and playing all sorts of games to try to justify that.