And, once again, the declining real estate market is to blame:
The first slide in County Executive Craig Gerhart’s presentation to the Prince William Board of County Supervisors said it all.
It showed an out-of-balance set of scales with building blocks labeled “schools,” “roads,” “police and fire” and “parks and libraries” far outweighing other blocks representing various taxes and fees.
Gerhart has been periodically warning the supervisors that if things remain the same, the county won’t have the money to do things that probably need doing.
In October, Gerhart told the supervisors that the real estate market has declined nearly 30 percent from last year. A slowing real estate market means the county collects less in real estate taxes.
Real estate values that have fallen by 14 percent only exacerbate the problem.
He sounded the alarm again Tuesday, telling the supervisors that they had some tough choices to make if they wanted to maintain their policies of keeping school children out of trailers, fire and rescue response times to a minimum and sufficient police officers on the streets.
Gearhart’s solution is one that the Board of Supervisors isn’t going to like, and certainly one they didn’t tell us about in the last election — higher taxes:
The current tax rate is 78.7 cents per $100 of assessed value. At that rate, the county would come up $51.7 million short in fiscal 2009, $79.5 million short in fiscal 2010 and $108 million short in fiscal 2011, according to county finance documents.
Projections show that raising the tax rate to 91.5 cents in fiscal 2009 will balance the budget and leave the average tax bill about the same. In 2010, the tax rate will have to be raised to 99.5 cents.
That would leave Prince William County with one of the highest property tax rates in Northern Virginia.
Do I smell a tax revolt in the making ?
December 13th, 2007 at 10:02 am
I think that most people look at the bottom line and not the tax rate itself. If what they are paying stays about the same, the rate is more or less irrelevant to most people. Besides, expert opinion is that the market in PWC and Loudoun will rebound by 2010, so the rate for that year is only an uneducated guesstimate.