A rose by any other name

August 5, 2014

We unfortunately know that El Paso residents have the 7th highest property tax bill of the 50 largest cities in the United States.  Our position will climb when we start factoring in debt service for the bonds that city council has been selling.

We learned last week that for those of us in the EPISD district our city takes 25% of our local taxes compared to a state-wide average of 17%.  The district is getting 46% of those local taxes compared to 54% statewide.  Our priorities seem screwed up.

But wait!

As though the city trough is not deep and wide enough city council is considering raising the city’s tax rate 2.1 cents per hundred dollars of evaluation to 69.9 cents.  That works out to about a 3% increase, or $26 dollars a year on what we are told is the average home (one valued at $124,000).

Wait again!

Council also wants to raise the franchise fee that our electric company is charged from 4% to 5%.  The fee is passed on to the consumers, so you and I will pay it.  If this money was to be generated through property taxes they would have to add 1.45 cents to our property tax rate.

That puts us at an increase of 3.55 cents per hundred.

Keep waiting!

Council is also considering adding another $1 per month to our trash bill.  The city runs that service and it generates a profit that is taken from the department and used by the city.  The bill would thus increase $12 per year or the equivalent of another .96 cents on our tax bill.

Now we are at 4.51 cents per hundred.

The answer is:

City council is also considering imposing a franchise tax on our city owned water utility.  That tax would be added to our water bills thus generating another $3.5 million for the city each year from our wallets.

This works out to about another 1.05 cents per hundred brining us to an increase of 5.56 cents per hundred or about an 8% tax increase.

The mayor is right

He was quoted the other day as having said “It’s not a hidden tax”.  He is absolutely right–it is a tax increase right out in the open.

We deserve better

Brutus

 

 

7 Comments | City government, El Paso Independent School District, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Are we to see more of the same at the city?

August 4, 2014

Our new city manager has appointed an interim chief financial officer.  He is the former city comptroller and is both a CPA and a Phd.

The question

Does he learn quickly or is he trying to get his arms around his new job?

The Tuesday, August 5, 2014 city council agenda gives us reason to wonder.  Item 9 on the regular agenda is “Presentation and discussion on the 3rd Quarter Budget Report for FY2014”.  Some concerned citizens would like to study the report so that they might ask questions of city council as is their right.  The report is not available on the website even though it should be.

Are they deliberately trying to avoid transparency?  If this is an oversight why didn’t someone who knows the rules explain what he needs to do?  If not providing the report to be published with the agenda was deliberate why was the item allowed to be placed on the agenda?

We deserve better

Brutus

4 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Street conditions

August 3, 2014

Our local streets are falling apart.  I hope that our readers will use this post to nominate streets for repaving.

The city has published schedules that tell us what they plan to repave in 2014.  You can see one here.

According to the schedule there are no streets in district one that will be repaved this year.

I don’t live on Singing Hills but needed to travel on the street the other day.  It is in unbelievably poor condition.

The homes on the street are listed on the central appraisal district web site.  Their appraised value comes to a little over 20 million dollars.

Obviously nobody on the street is pulling strings to get preferential treatment.

To me one aspect of quality of life is the condition of our streets.

We deserve better

Brutus

6 Comments | City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Please don’t revitalize us any more!

August 1, 2014

Let’s look at downtown revitalization as a result of the creation of the ball park.

Texas requires that a mixed beverage gross receipts tax of 6.7% be paid by the owner of the establishment (not the customer) .  The state maintains a web site where we can see receipts for each facility (bar, restaurant …) in the state that sells such beverages.  Let’s call those places bars for the sake of simplicity.

The file that the state made available in April, 2014 reflects taxes for March and earlier (sometimes a bar will report late).  The amount for our bars in 79901 (the downtown district) was $80,020.75.  This was before our ball park opened.

The July, 2014 file from the state shows $86,368.28 in receipts for the 79901 area.

Looks good

It appears that we have had a $6,000 or so increase in collections after the ball park opened.  That comes to roughly 8%.  More beverages were sold.

Except

One thing that is different between July in April is that our ball park was open in July and not for the period represented by the April file.

How much did the ball park contribute to the $86,368.28?  The answer is $11,883.52.  That means that business for the rest of the 79901 area was down to $74,484.76, a decline of $5,535.99 or  almost 7% lower.

To get to real sales numbers, the state says to  divide any of the numbers above by 14 and then multiply the result by 100.  Using that technique the downtown bars lost $39,542.78 in sales.

The winner is

The state pays the city the money that is collected.

I don’t expect that the bar owners downtown will send thank you notes to the city for cannibalizing their businesses.

We deserve better

Brutus

15 Comments | Ball park, City government, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Take it from the kids again

July 29, 2014

The Texas comptroller of public accounts published a report titled “Your Money and the Taxing Facts”.  The report discusses taxes in Texas.

One subject her report addresses is local property taxes in 2010.  The breakdown was provided with four categories:

Entity                             % of local total statewide

Cities                                        16.78

Counties                                   16.31

Special districts*                       13.38

School districts                          53.52

 *these include hospital and community college districts

Not us

I was surprised to see that:

Our city takes 25.26% of our local property taxes compared with the 16.78% cities take on the average statewide.

Our county is right in line at 16.13% compared with 16.31% for counties statewide.

Our special districts are at 12.61%, thus under the statewide average of 13.38%

And for those of us in the El Paso Independent School District we are paying 45.99% in school taxes compared with 53.52% in the remainder of the state.

Vote for change

Some at the city have called us “crazies” for being concerned about their spending habits.

These numbers need to be justified or they need to be changed.

The simple facts are that we spend almost 8% less of our local tax money on education and almost 9% more on our city government than the rest of the state.

If no other numbers call us to action, these should.  The fact that we have the 7th highest tax burden of people in the largest 50 cities in the United States should have been enough to call us to action.  The fact that we are short changing our children and feathering the city’s nest is just wrong.

We deserve better

Brutus

 

3 Comments | City government, County Government, El Paso Independent School District, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

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