I took the time to look up my own home and it went up by nearly 25% over last years value. Now figure in the exemption for homeowners (a feel good tax shift that has to be made up elsewhere) of 50% of $90,000. And add it all together and our overlords of spending as much as they can as fast as they can and voila I come up with a 23% increase in my property taxes this year.
We can all wait to see what the new and improved values will be and that bit of the puzzle will come out in late May or early June.. always after the elections. Then we get the actual bills late November as an early Christmas present. The election season will bring forth a long list of those preaching their smaller government, lower tax mantra in the hopes of garnering our votes. The reality is a super minority will be doing the picking of the princes of government as we move into the May primary vote.
In theory as the assessed values go up the levy rate should go down but the reality is it probably won't. The beasts who spends our tax dollars have an insatiable thirst for more and more money from all of us.
Just think, Tom Dale has a very good chance of unseating Kathy Alder for county commie. Now we may be under his plan of spending money we don't have on a county-wide basis.
ReplyDeleteHow quickly people seem to forget how much Commissioner Alder with the help of Commissioner Rule and for Commissioner Ferdinand cost the taxpayer of Canyon County with the Bujak fiasco and the Hemenway trial and judgment. Big, big bucks!!!
DeleteJust for a moment try to understand, Commissioners are not lawyers. Bujak was their chief legal council and was leading them by the nose down the path he wanted them to follow. Also, understand, Idaho law permits the County Prosecutor to make a profit from another job. This power was granted by the legislature mainly to help with the fact most small counties in Idaho have only a part time Prosecutor/Civil attorney. It is easy to look in hind sight at pillory the Commissioners. I agree Ferdninand needed to go. I think the campaign will winnow out who should stay and who should go. Let's do it based on facts and not emotion. I think Alder and Rule have been chastened by the Bujak mess and it won't ever happen again with all the hindsight in all of this.
DeleteI don't think that Tom Dale has a chance. He has got a tax and spend tax record. The County's rural folk, aren't going to vote for that city-slicker.
DeleteHow quickly we forget that Tom Dale's office was the other party(besides Canyon County) to the Bujak contract fiasco!!!
DeleteNampa and Caldwell are the drivers of our property taxes. Add to all of this are school bonds and levy's we all passed. I personally do not think the schools deserved the override levy's but that is history. That now leaves us with Nampa and Caldwell to control expenses and neither have shown any propensity to contain their city levy rates. In contrast, the county returned money to taxpayers by a margin of 4%.
ReplyDeleteAs bad as they are taxes are the price we pay for the services we get. Property taxes are the most regressive tax I know. Nampa looks like they are on the path to fixing the waste and spend days of Tom Dale with new Mayor Bob Henry and his conservative City Council members. Sadly, Caldwell remains a property taxpayers nightmare. Mayor Nancolas, and his rubber stamp City Council are a problem that has not reached the boiling point with those feeding the tax monster.
The really irksome part of being a homeowner is watching my assessed value and the wild swings in assessed values. The only thing I know for sure is what I paid for my home and the next real valuation will happen when I sell it. Meanwhile, we are all subject to the whim of property tax assessed values. I have seen 100% swings in my tax bills for my home in recent years. And the magic in all of this is all I have done is live here and wait for my next property tax bill.
Property taxes are mostly budget driven, not assessment driven. Idaho Code requires all properties to be assessed at "100% market value." Not all property types appreciate or depreciate at the same rate, every year. The real estate market changes all the time and are based on actual property sales. Also, your property taxes will not change at the same rate(up or down) as your assessment.
DeleteThe other factor to note is that the assessor's office only appraises 1/5 of the County properties each year, by Idaho Code. The other 4/5 of properties are trended up or down, depending on ratio studies(property sales/prior year's assessments). If you do not agree with your assessment, you can appeal your assessment before the 4th Monday in June, after you receive your assessment notice.
There is absolutely no benefit to the assessor's office over or under assessing properties, but errors do occur with over 85,000 parcels in Canyon County to value. Property owners are ultimately responsible for making sure the assessor's office valued their property correctly, each year.
The Idaho legislature created the laws governing how properties are to be assessed each year. The assessor's office is audited a couple times each year, to make sure they are in compliance.
Utlimatly, each levy district will receive the property taxes they budget, regardless of what your assessed value does. This is the simplistic version of assessment 101 and how it affects your taxes. The post below this one, highlighting the budgets and long term liabilities/debt, understands what is ultimately fueling the property taxes we pay, other than URAs. They get the big picture.
My experience has been a fluctuation in the value of my home from a high of about $287,000 clear down to $120,000 with the amount of taxes paid directly reflected in those values. I have now quarrel with what the Assessor is charged to do but I do take issue with the willingness and outright efforts of Tom Dale and Garret Nancolas to lobby the Assessor to raise the assessed values closer to 110% of assessed values when the recession hit. I am not making this up it is a fact. I also think most people are unaware of just how much Nampa and Caldwell's URA's impact their property taxes both inside and outside the boundaries of the UR Districts.
DeleteProperty taxes in Canyon County levy rates are 40% higher than they are in Ada County. I do think the County Comm's. have done a decent job of holding the line on their portion of what I pay.
Who is the person that thinks it is so easy to challenge an assessment. The old saying of an act of Congress comes to mind. Like one eye in a bottle of bourbon, and another eye on a tee time for golf.
DeleteSpot on, Paul! Most citizens don't understand the enormous impact URAs have on the entire County's taxes....not just the taxes within the URA districts.
DeleteHere are some figures taken from Canyon County and Nampa city financial statements:
ReplyDeleteCC operating budget 2008 --$83,284,057 2012---$67,399,807 a 19% decrease
Nampa Total Expenses 2008 $85,890,240 2011--$97,604,352 a 13% increase
Long term Liabilities or debt
Canyon county 2008--$4,656,765 Nampa--2008 $38,514,995
2012--$5,995,850 2013 $71,192,981
You do the math on who is controlling their budget!!!
Thanks for the information. If Tom Dale gets elected as a Commissioner we can all look forward to his spending and wasteful ways. I drove by the new Nampa Library today and all I could think is, what the hell are they doing with our money. Ditto for the parking garage. Is anyone in Nampa paying attention to all of this?
DeleteOh yeah, we are paying attention. We got him out, and quite a few people over here will be voting to keep him out, and sent down the road.
DeleteThis Sheriff we have is going around saying our jail is crumbling and falling apart. If so, show us the proof of that statement. They want to build a new jail and raise our taxes even more. My view is they have figured out how to manage what they have for the last 8 years and crime has gone down without a new jail. At some point in the future we may need more jail space and I do agree a regional jail is an idea worth exploring.
ReplyDeleteIt is a fact that the Canyon County jail wasn't designed to house the female population we have incarcerated plus it has been claimed for years that it was a poorly designed jail in the first place. A few years ago, the ACLU threatened lawsuits unless populations were reduced. Right now CC houses inmates in other neighboring county jails at a significant cost to the County.
DeleteI would like to see the actual costs incurred each year by Canyon County to "outsource" these prisoners, as well as the cost of operating our current facility versus the cost of building and operating a new proposed facility. It would make more sense to give the tax payers ALL of the information, before asking the voters to pass a levy without knowing all the facts and options. Past jail bond levy elections failed because the voters weren't given any real facts on the cost benefits, if any, of such a new facility.
I can answer the outsourcing costs. The last number presented was about $60K for last year. The Commissioners back when the first jail bond was put out for consideration was full of misinformation, outright deceptions and no facts or figures on how much it would cost to maintain and operate that jail facility. They also violated the Idaho Constitution on the purchase of the land. The second jail bond effort was for the site out on Hwy. 20/26 and again was fraught with all manner of poorly presented costs for operation, transportation, and labor to staff the place. The site was also an in our face purchase at a price that they could never sell that property for today.
DeletePrior to getting used to limited jail space and managing it to keep costs to taxpayers in control was not a consideration. Now the Prosecutor, Judges and Sheriff meet on a regular basis to manage jail resources. The reality is crime rates are going down in Canyon County. The current Jail was brought online around 1994. It does have some inherent design flaws but it does keep people incarcerated. Also, the "tent" has been repurposed to house general population male inmates freeing up capacity in the Dale Haile complex. I am not certain what the old jail is used for these days.
Storage space for the clerk is what the old jail is used for today. Rather than build him more space they have allowed him to use it to store stuff in.
Deletea few months ageo I spoke to a bussiness owner in downtown Nampa. He said that his property taxes have increased 65% over the last 5 years. His property tax bill figures out to $138 a day 7 days a week.
ReplyDelete