From the Free Lance-Star today:
In an effort to offset a potential budget shortfall of about $30 million, Stafford County Administrator Anthony Romanello is proposing a real estate tax rate increase of almost 20 cents.
So even with declining real estate values, Stafford homeowners could see higher tax bills this June.
Romanello presented the 2009 proposed budget to the Board of Supervisors yesterday. He suggested raising the real estate tax rate from 70 cents per $100 of assessed value to 89.8 cents, an increase of about 28 percent.
With that increase, the average homeowner would pay an extra $206 on his tax bill each year.
A penny on the tax rate in Stafford generates about $1.5 million.
The county is already facing about a $6.4 million shortfall this year, largely due to declining sales taxes, recordation, development and the housing-market slump. The most recent budget projections put the deficit at about $13.5 million.
However, county departments slashed their spending by 7 percent, helping save about $6 million.
The School Board also is cutting expenditures by about $1.5 million.
This is not the county administrator’s fault as he must only balance the budget he’s given to work with. The supervisors, planning commission, and school boards all have their hand in the making of expenses.
Let’s give some credit where it’s due finally, the school board “cut expenditures by $1.5 million”! That’s got to be the first I’ve heard of any regional SB cutting anything.
I hope it’s not just a shell game though; the kind where they build or open a new school they don’t need to add up to around 5,000 total empty seats in the county system, then hire a few teachers to work in the empty school, re-route a whole lot of daily routines for families so the kids can attend this new school, spend a few million per year operating it, and then decide to “make the tough call” and cut a few teacher’s jobs and possibly close another school “due to budget constraints” and reflect a “cost savings” of a few million per year. Which results in them patting themselves on the back for making ”cuts”.
Let’s hope it’s nothing like that.
When was the last tax bill that you received that went DOWN?
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