City of Midvale issued the following announcement on June 7.
As mayor, I’m committed to be transparent, honest, and open in my communication to residents. That’s why it’s important to me that I let you know a property tax increase is being proposed for this year. The fact that our city will be considering a property tax increase in our current time of high inflation and cost of living increases, is not something I take lightly. However, just as inflation is impacting all of us, the same is true for our city. That’s why I wanted to explain the reasoning behind this proposed increase and describe the budgetary challenges we face as a city. Before I go on, I’ll also add that all of this is tentative and things do, and will, change. It’s mid-May as I write this, and by the time you read this, things could have changed drastically.
Only a small amount of your property taxes come to Midvale City. While looking at my own property taxes, last year I paid a total of $2,367, of which $182 went to Midvale City. This was a mere 7.7% of the property tax I paid. The largest part of our property taxes goes to our schools and Salt Lake County.
So, what exactly is your Midvale City property tax going towards? It’s simple: Unified Police Department. Every cent of property tax collected by Midvale City pays for law enforcement, but it only covers 31% of the total cost. This means the other 69% of our law enforcement is funded by sales tax and other smaller revenue streams. Just a year ago, our member fee to Unified Police Department was $9.2 million, but that is increasing to $11.7 million – a $2.5 million increase that our city must come up with. Projections show that our current property tax rate will now only cover 23% of our entire police costs and that 45% of our entire general fund budget will go to law enforcement services.
Understanding how much (or rather how little) our property taxes cover our contract cost with the Unified Police Department, and how much of our general fund budget is dedicated to law enforcement, becomes critical in understanding how challenging it is to keep costs low while providing the daily services that we all expect to have as residents.
As far as Midvale City’s own budgetary increases are concerned, we are proposing to fund a cost-of-living increase for all our employees. Last year we had 32% of our staff turnover, which meant services for our residents were impacted as staff tried to cover multiple jobs. That’s why we are proposing an 8% cost of living pay increase for all employees to help our city stay competitive in the job market and ensure that the critical services we provide are maintained for our residents. Outside of this, the budgetary requests from our staff were minimal, as we work to keep costs as low as possible.
We expect in the upcoming fiscal year that our city revenues will increase by 10% and our expenses will increase by 14%. This means we are left with approximately a $700,000 funding deficit that we must make up for by either increasing property taxes, using our rainy-day fund to help offset the cost for this year, cutting back city services, or some combination of these options. At this point, projections show that by using property taxes to cover this entire deficit, a 26% property tax increase would be necessary (a $48 increase for the average homeowner per year). However, by using some of our rainy-day funds, we could cut that back to 10.8% (a $20 increase for the average homeowner per year) or use both rainy-day funds and cut back city services to do a 4.8% increase (a $9 increase for the average homeowner per year).
As I stated at the beginning, much of this is still in the air at the time of this writing, but any proposed property tax increase would need to be announced by June 22nd, which is why I feel it’s so important to be transparent about these budgetary restrictions our city faces and I hope our residents see how hard we working to keep costs low in these uncertain times with inflation and cost of living increases.
Original source can be found here.
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