The cost of living is going up, and the City of Taylor’s new budget will likely reflect that through increased revenues from higher property values as well as higher fees for utilities, such as water and sewer.
“The city is not raising water rates and sewer rates just because we want to,” said District 4 Councilman Robert Garcia at the City Council meeting Sept. 8. “The cost of doing business is up everywhere. I know Georgetown is going up 11 and a half percent every year for the next five years. Water is becoming a very severe commodity, and we all need to preserve our water as much as possible.”
At the meeting, the council moved forward with increasing some fees for services beginning Oct. 1, including a 10 percent increase in water rates and an 8 percent increase in wastewater rates, 3.4 percent increase for solid waste collection, as well as fee amendments for the airport, animal control, cemetery, parks and recreation and development services.
To help new residents and people not vigilant about how the system works, Chief Financial Officer Jeff Wood said they were also proposing changing monthly wastewater charges to an average of four months, from three.
“What we will do is we will drop off the highest of those four months so you will get the three lowest months will be your wastewater average,” Wood said at the meeting. “So that way if you have a one-off accident where you forget to turn off your sprinklers and you have an extra high usage month, you still have three other months to make sure you get that average back down and we will just use those three lower months.”
At the meeting, the Council also adopted the $48 million annual budget for fiscal year 2022/2023, which is a $12 million increase in expenditures from last year, and the council adopted a tax rate of $.65 cents per $100 valuation, which is 11 cents lower than last year.
According to city documents, despite this year’s lower tax rate, the budget will bring in more total property taxes by approximately $1.8 million due to more properties being added to the tax role.
At the meeting, the ordinances for the budget and tax rate were passed 4-1, with At-Large Councilman Dwayne Ariola casting the lone dissenting votes.
Ariola said he wanted to emphasize that the council was obligated by state law to lower the tax rate due to property values rising so quickly.
“We are lowering the tax rate by law; otherwise, we would have to go to the citizens for anything greater than a three and a half percent increase of the revenue we had last year,” Ariola said. “It’s not the kindness of our hearts by law we are lowering the tax rate because our property values went up. I understand we need more revenue to give everyone raises to make all the improvements, but I want to make sure everyone is clear we are not lowering that because of the goodness of our hearts. We have to.”
In response Garcia asked Wood if the council could have raised the rate another penny, which Wood confirmed was true.
“OK, so we took a penny out of our hearts and took it down to .648,” Garcia said.
Later, Garcia also pointed out a half cent sales tax that goes towards property relief.
