Fresh Loaf

UPDATE: Word comes in that City Council might make a motion to reconsider the property-tax vote. More details to come. The move to reconsider failed. The final budget adoption will most likely take place around 1:30 p.m.

The Atlanta Business Chronicle reports the Atlanta City Council this morning narrowly approved a three mill property-tax increase that will plug a $56 million budget shortfall. The average homeowner will see his or her property tax bill increase by $240.

The 8-7 vote Monday morning to raise property taxes by 3 mills was still considered preliminary. It is contingent upon council members adopting the mayor’s $541 million fiscal 2010 budget, a vote expected to take place on Monday afternoon.

The closeness of the tax vote reflected criticism aimed at the council during several public hearings for considering a tax hike in the midst of a severe recession.

…

If the budget passes, the tax increase would allow the city to end employee furloughs during the fiscal year that starts on Wednesday. Furloughs of police officers and firefighters, and the subsequent impact on public safety, emerged as major concerns during the council’s review of Franklin’s budget.

The vote’s roll call:

Yeas: Carla Smith, Ivory Lee Young, Jr., Natalyn Archibong, Anne Fauver, Felicia Moore, C.T. Martin, Joyce Sheperd and Ceasar Mitchell.

Nays: Kwanza Hall, Cleta Winslow, Howard Shook, Clair Muller, Jim Maddox, Mary Norwood and H. Lamar Willis.

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Has anyone else received an anonymous robo-call opposing Mayor Shirley Franklin’s proposed property tax increase for Atlanta residents?

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Today is the deadline for Fulton, Clayton and Cobb County property owners to appeal their property tax assessments.

Just curious: did any Fresh Loaf readers file appeals?

I’m about to file mine. In true journalistic fashion, I’ve waited until deadline day.

Fulton County wants to tax my home in Southwest Atlanta based on its 2006 value. Home values in much of Southwest Atlanta have, in fact, been in free-fall since early 2007.

The situation is so bad at the moment, if you look up 2BD/1BA listings near my home you’ll find a home on sale for $6,700. It’s almost certainly a rat-infested shit-hole (or, possibly, a shit-infested rat-hole), but it drags down the value of every other 2BD/1BA home in the area.

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In case you haven’t been following the news, Georgia cities and counties are mighty pissed at Gov. Sonny Perdue because he cut a homeowner property-tax credit from the state budgets for the next, uhm, forever. Perdue says these Roy Barnes-created grants cost the state $428 million each year and haven’t lowered property taxes as they were originally intended.

Yesterday, Perdue told a group of county commissioners as such. Insider Advantage’s Dick Pettys was in attendance and captured the reactions of some county commissioner-folk.

Lamar Paris, sole commissioner of Union County, said, “We’re just all going to have to go through and just cut the guts out of our county government …”

Wow, that’s a good quote. Very telling, kind of ominous, sounds like … WAIT! Holy shit. Lamar Paris is the sole commissioner of Union County? Brothers and sisters to the north, we will save you from this dictator!

(more…)

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T-Boz Watkins

Amount that Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins of TLC owes in back payments on her Gwinnett County home, according to foreclosure docs filed in December: $532,500

Square footage of the home, which is located in Sugarloaf Country Club: 10,000

Amount in back rent owed by NeNe Leakes, one of the “Real Housewives of Atlanta,” and her husband when they were evicted in September: $6,240

Amount that “Real Housewife” Sheree Whitfield is asking for her suburban Atlanta home, which was recently put on the market: $2.8 million

Dollar amount of a check that Whitfield recently bounced: $346.61

Amount that Whitney Houston’s stepmother is seeking from the pop diva after Houston allegedly kept her late father’s $1 million insurance policy — rather than pay off his mortgage: $723,000

Sale price of the home of “American Idol” winner Fantasia Barrino, which was put up for auction after she failed to repay money loaned to her to pay property taxes: $1.1 million

(Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

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Some early-morning speculation on my part, fueled by caffeine and a post from InsiderAdvantage’s Dick Pettys. The George Harrison doppelganger tapped his sources who attended a business community fundraiser yesterday for House Speaker Glenn Richardson:

Richardson told the group he intends to focus on transportation, water and the state’s budget problems if re-elected as presiding officer.

Maybe the state’s current economic woes convinced Richardson he shouldn’t tackle his greatest nemesis, property taxes, as he promised he would during an April press conference he held with Gov. Sonny Perdue and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle?

Speculate! It’s just like daydreamin’, only it leeches off reality and you’re doing it out loud!

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The budgetary back-and-forth between Shirley Franklin and the Atlanta City Council took on the feel of a cut-throat, high-stakes poker match this past Friday, with the mayor effectively calling their bet – and raising.

When the Council adopted a $571 million city budget for 2009 at the end of June, it sidestepped a proposed tax increase by tasking Franklin to trim $14.6 million from city expenses – on top of more than $57 million in cuts she’d already undertaken to avoid a projected budget shortfall.

On Friday, the mayor upped the ante, instead slashing $21.6 million – nearly 50 percent more than requested – from the budget, at the cost of a West End fire station, a streetlight maintenance contract, vacant police jobs and 78 city employees, including 34 firefighters. That’s in addition to the more than 400 staffers laid off in May.

Franklin didn’t maintain a good poker face; clearly angry, she blamed the Council for forcing her hand. “Their actions will affect the city for a long time to come,” she said.

Minutes later, Council President Lisa Borders countered that the choices were Franklin’s and would be reviewed – and possibly reversed – by the Council. “To indicate that the Council mandated cuts to police and fire is disingenuous,” she said. “We’re not done yet with these cuts.”

Unfortunately, that isn’t all they’re not done with.

On Monday, a judge ordered that, for now, Atlanta and other municipalities within Fulton County could only collect taxes based on 2007 values for most commercial properties – not the 2008 reassessments, which were about 20 percent higher.

No one at City Hall yet knows the full impact of the ruling, but it could mean city revenue would be tens of millions less than anticipated in coming months. Under the judge’s decision, additional taxes cannot be collected on assessments under appeal until more than half of the 15,000 appeals are resolved by the county, a process that likely will take months.

In fact, Robert Proctor, the attorney challenging the county’s assessments, has filed a new lawsuit challenging the certification of tax officials hearing appeals. If his suit succeeds, the appeals process would grind to a halt, adding more months to the delay in tax collections.

Borders said she hopes to learn the scope of the damage by early next week. She also is waiting to hear from city attorneys on the legality of re-opening the budget process, if that step becomes necessary. When it approved the city budget in June, the Council likewise set the tax rate for the coming year. It’s unknown whether the city can revisit that decision so soon.

Said Borders: “This situation is unprecedented.”

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An Atlanta City Council member complained to me recently that the capitol city was taking a drubbing in the media over Mayor Franklin’s proposed tax increase, while other tax-hiking entities were getting off scot-free.

After a bit of research, I determined she’s right – depending on your definition of tax increase.

At the risk of boring the tax-savvy, I’ll explain that the amount you pay in property taxes is determined by two variables – your property assessment and the millage rate – and one constant, your total exemptions. If your assessment doesn’t change, but the millage rate is increased, you pay more. If the millage rate stays the same, but your assessment goes up, you also pay more – what is commonly called a “back-door” tax increase.

A few weeks ago, Fulton County, which oversees the assessment process, announced that property valuations had risen a whopping 19 percent, mostly due to higher assessments for commercial property. This means that Fulton, its 12 cities and two school systems, can all expect a tax-revenue windfall even without raising millage rates.

For Franklin, that’s not good enough. In order to erase a projected $40 million city budget shortfall, she initially proposed a tax hike of about 1.7 mills, then dropped that to .43 mills, based on the county’s assessment estimates. This would mean the owner of a $200,000 house would pay an extra $24.50 a year in property taxes, assuming a standard homestead exemption.

That’s fairly meager compared to the $2,400 total tax bill for the example we’re describing, but it still represents a tax hike. The Atlanta Board of Education, on the other hand, plans to keep its tax rate – at 22.65 mills, more than twice the city’s proposed rate of 9.35 mills – the same as last year.

But just by virtue of the higher assessments, the school board expects to collect an extra $88 million in property taxes next year, more than twice the $40 million the city wants to raise by increasing its tax rate.

In other words, the schools’ back-door increase would bring in far more additional tax revenue than the city’s proposed up-front tax hike. And the Council member was certainly right about there being no public outcry over the back-door increase. Should there be?

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