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OPINIONS
June 20, 2019 |
 |
 Wingate Lassiter |
Okay, taxpayers: Figure your new
tax bill before you start complaining
Good day, class. Welcome to this week's session:
"Property Tax Arithmetic 101."
Now that the County of Johnston and the Town of Smithfield have adopted their annual budgets and set property-tax rates for the new fiscal year starting July 1, we can figure what our actual bills will be after countywide real-estate revaluation.
Those bills haven't changed for most folks in eight years, but they'll be different for everyone this year: most of them higher, a few of them lower, depending on how your property was revalued.
So here's the arithmetic:
If you are a resident or a business within the corporate limits of Smithfield, pull out your "2019 Revaluation --- Notice of Assessed Value" that you received earlier this year, locate the newly assigned "Market Value," take that number and multiply it by 0.0133, and the result is what your bill for this year will be.
If you live outside of Smithfield or any other municipality in the county, multiply the "Market Value" number by 0.0076 to calculate your bill.
Now, in case you're wondering where those multipliers came from, it's simple:
The County of Johnston's new tax rate is 76 cents per $100 valuation.
The Town of Smithfield's tax rate is unchanged at 57 cents per $100 valuation.
Added together, the total is $1.33 per $100 valuation for Smithfield residents.
How much is your bill going up?
Pull out last year's bill and compare it with the new calculation. Rather than "play the percentages" (as many of my media colleagues like to do), look at the actual dollar difference and then react accordingly:
Is it an "excessive" increase?
Or is it "reasonable" in light of eight years without an property-tax hike?
In my example as a Smithfield homeowner, the new bill is $172.44 higher (that's an increase of 4.4%). Not so bad, but then Smithfield real-estate values haven't risen as much as those in Clayton and other communities closer to Raleigh. (The "Market Value" of our residence went up just 6% over the last revaluation in 2011.)
Any questions?
What about the public schools?
The new county budget increases appropriations for Johnston County Public Schools by $5.5 million, but that's well short of what the Board of Education had requested. So what's going to be cut in the school board's adjusted budget?
For one thing, some "savings" are going to be realized if the General Assembly follows through on salary increases for state-paid teachers and other employees. The original budget request from Johnston's school board assumed a 5% pay raise from the Legislature, but now it appears that figure is going to be considerably lower than that, and then likely spread over two years rather than one.
Another place for "savings" is the school board's recent elimination of 43 positions by shifting those employees into other vacant jobs within the system.
What school board members, and the superintendent, made plain during their recent budget deliberations is that raising local supplements paid teachers by 1 percentage point across the board will be top priority in a revised school budget.
Who can oppose that? Especially in light of the General Assembly's continuing reluctance to pay our teachers what they're truly worth.
A couple of "progressive" measures
The new county budget includes a couple of "progressive" measures embraced by our "conservative" County Commissioners. They're not expensive items in the context of a $243-million budget, but they're significant nonetheless:
• One is an appropriation of $76,000 for Johnston County to join a regional study of commuter rail service linking us with Raleigh and the Research Triangle. As much as I like trains, I'd rather we get more good-paying jobs closer to home that would move us away from so much commuting. But reality dictates that we'd better plan for an alternative commuter mechanism other than more and more highway lanes that tend to generate greater and greater traffic congestion.
• The other "progressive" item is employment of a professional person to address a growing need for better public recreation opportunities in suburban communities outside our towns. The new position is entitled "Parks, Greenways, and Open Space Coordinator." That's not creating a county recreation department, but the new job will step up the County of Johnston's support of projects like the proposed Cleveland Community Park and extension of the bicycle and pedestrian trail along the Neuse River from Clayton to Smithfield.
Embracing forward-looking ideas like these gives us hope that Johnston County's quality of life can get even better than it is now.
Won't
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