Citizens, business owners should look closely at budget claims, language

As a Lubbock business owner, homeowner and taxpayer, I found the article “Sirens, Streets and More” (A-J, 8-9) confusing to Lubbock taxpayers for several reasons:

“City is proposing a tax decrease” This is incorrect, the city is decreasing the tax rate (“from 55.8802 cents per $100 property valuation to 54.1573 cents”), but the city is still planning to adopt a tax rate that is above the 2020 no-new-revenue tax rate of 53.5885 cents per $100.

“The city is trying not to use the term effective tax rate any more since the language in the state’s new property tax law is different, but the city is looking to adopt what’s essentially the effective tax rate.” - A more accurate term would be: “no-new-revenue tax rate.” Regardless the city is not looking to adopt the effective tax rate or the no-new-revenue tax rate and “essentially the effective tax rate” is a statutorily meaningless description of the proposed tax rate.

“This means the average homeowner in Lubbock would pay the same amount in city taxes year-over-year, even with appraisal growth.” - This statement may be true if the average homestead values have slightly decreased since last year. However, the statement is not true for all property owners because appraised values increased.

“With this proposal as it is presented, the structure is designed so that the average single-family resident in Lubbock, the tax bill in the new year will be the same as it was this year” - Similarly to the above statement, this statement does not address the tax bills for taxpayers who own property other than single-family residences.

“The proposed tax decrease comes after the city council raised the city’s tax rate by one cent each of the last two years” - The claim that the city is “proposing a tax decrease,” while still exceeding the no-new-revenue tax rate, becomes increasingly absurd when considering the two prior years of tax increases. To decrease taxes, the city should lower the tax rate below the no-new-revenue tax rate.

“Debt continues rolling off — Mayor Dan Pope said Lubbock is starting to see the fruits of their discipline, as the city’s overall debt is set to decrease 7.7% this upcoming fiscal year. ‘That’s over $107 million in a year,’ Pope said when he was highlighting his favorite parts of the budget on Monday. ‘That doesn’t happen without a level of commitment from the people who run the organizations that serve our citizens every day.’ The majority of the proposed tax rate decrease, 1.1 of the 1.6 cents, is on the portion of the tax rate that goes towards paying off debt.” - Mayor Pope appears to take credit for the city paying off debt supported by property taxes when the credit should be with the taxpayers that remit the property taxes the City uses to pay down its debt.

Granted, this is a complex subject, but citizens need to be aware of all aspects of the tax issue. I would encourage my fellow business and homeowners to carefully review our elected officials and professional staff’s statements as our city’s budget is discussed.

Anna Johnston is a Lubbock native and president of Ki Corp, a local software business.