By Larry Riley in the Muncie Star-Press:
Looking at what could almost be called the vagaries of local taxes for property owners as I did last week, we might as well complete the tax picture of those Muncie leaders who establish the city tax rate.
To be sure, the city’s tax rate jumped 27 percent this year over last year’s rate, going from about $1.50 in taxes for every $100 worth of assessed value of property to almost $2.
Yet for many taxpayers, particularly homeowners, this tax hike is meaningless. That’s because property tax caps, phased in four years ago and now fully in place, limit the total amount of property taxes one can pay.
If your taxes were capped in 2012 — meaning you paid the maximum state law allowed — your taxes can rise higher this year only under one condition: if the assessed value of your property went up.
That did happen to some individual properties, but for as many or more, values went down.
Last week, I used City Councilman Julius Anderson as an example of this. His Whitely property assessment went down nearly 10 percent and he already was paying at the capped limit. So his property taxes went down this year by the same percentage since the cap is set at an amount equal to 1 percent of a property’s gross assessed value for a homeowner who lives in their home.
The same is true with Councilwoman Alison Quirk, whose Halteman Village house value went down 7 percent. Since she was also paying at the cap level last year, her overall taxes went down 7 percent.
Councilman Doug Marshall, who lives in, and represents, the city’s southeast side, ditto: assessment, and taxes, down 7.3 percent.
On the other hand, Councilman Jerry Dishman’s north-central Muncie home value rose 13 percent. Last year, his total taxes were just about equal to the cap, but with an increased assessed value, his cap this year goes up 13 percent.
So he’s paying 13 percent more in property taxes this year.
The same goes for Councilwoman Linda Gregory, whose home value went up 1.5 percent, and so, too, did her tax bite rise by that amount.
...
See the full article here:
http://www.thestarpress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013306090027
