The 2025 proposed budget is out on the county website for everyone to take a look. As always, the first question is what is the proposed tax rate? The good news is that the overall tax rate came down by over seven cents to a rate of $0.542 per hundred dollars for a drop of over seven cents, or 11.6% from last year. This move also brings us to a place where we are almost at the No-New-Revenue-Rate (NNR) only missing it by 1/1000th of a cent. The NNR Rate is the tax rate that raises an amount equal to last year’s tax revenue, which has been our goal since taking office.
The even better news is that that the increased revenue from property taxes of $637,199.08 should be covered by the tax revenues from new properties of $779,881.85. So, the next question if we dropped the tax rate and held down the amount of taxes raised, how did we increase the budget to meet the needs of a county growing as fast as Milam County? There are multiple answers to that question.
First and foremost, when we took office, we vowed to step up policies to create county regulations to help allow the growth to pay for itself with a robust, but not obtrusive Fee and Commission Structure. Some of the ways we have done that is to create new permitting more in-line with what other counties have already done. We instituted a driveway permit (mainly for commercial and retail developments), we updated the fee schedules for subdivision and development permits, we added a road boring, and also added a temporary waterline permit. As we redevelop the Subdivision Regulations there will be more opportunities to generate more revenue from these developments as well.
Next, we are also working with the appraisal district to aggressively enforce Property Tax Exemptions throughout the county. We did this by identifying solar, industrial and residential developments that would move properties from an Ag Exempt status changing their status to adjust the tax revenues. We also moved to regain the rollback taxes on these developments and to find other developments that were not identified this year or will be starting up in the near future. As more of these properties come out of Ag Production, we will remove them from those Ag Rolls.
Next, sales tax revenues have increased to allow for an increase of revenue from year-to-year of about $1,000,000 per year. Much of this increase has to do with the increase in prices throughout our economy caused by many of the unsound political policies of the federal government, but once established, those sales tax numbers seldom recede so we felt confident in moving the revenue line from sales tax up to help further offset property taxes.
Lastly, we did use some of the money to be recouped from the Solar Abatements to help the County Road & Bridge Departments; however, we decided to play it safe with the remainder and included that in the budget reserve in a manner to provide fiscal security in case these solar developments don’t pan out as advertised. Currently, we have no reason to believe that many of them won’t be on-line and in production, but until they are, we would rather play it safe and not rely on that money up front.
In the end, the budget did expand a bit, but it has to in order to improve the county infrastructure needed to handle the growth we are currently seeing and the growth that will assuredly continue to rise as we move in the future. What those infrastructure improvements will look like we will cover in the weeks to come. But for now, the important takeaway is that your elected officials are working to put the burden for that growth in the county budget on the new development and to make it as painless as possible for all of us long-time county residents.
To hear more on the 2025 Proposed Budget, there will be five town hall meetings in the next few weeks, and everyone is invited. The Town halls will all start at 6:30 p.m. as follows: Monday, Aug. 19 – Cameron, Bea’s Kitchen.
Tuesday, Aug. 20 – Buckholts, Community Center.
Wednesday, Aug. 21 – Thorndale, Chamber of Commerce.
Thursday, Aug. 22 – Milano, Community Center.
Monday, Aug. 26 – Rockdale, Kay Theater.
- Log in or Subscribe to post comments.