CITY COUNCIL
With no residents speaking out during a hearing on the city’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget and maximum 2024 tax rate, City Council will vote to adopt the proposals in about three weeks.
The meeting is 6 p.m. Sept. 12 in Council Chambers at 400 Porter St.
The FY 25 budget is $4,880,948 higher than the FY 24 budget. Details on the funds can be found by visiting taylortx.gov and searching for “2024-25 Proposed Budget.”
“We went into this budget process and asked all the departments to budget with the same dollars as they had in fiscal year ‘24, which they did. The only exceptions were police and fire where we made some in-year hires,” said Jeff Wood, city finance director, during Thursday’s session at City Hall. “The only other change that caused any increase in the departments were the compensation increases based on the compensation study.”
Taylor performed a labormarket study earlier in the year to make sure the city offered competitive salaries for the Central Texas region.“
We don’t spend like drunken sailors.”
- Mayor Dwayne Ariola The study resulted in wage hikes, increases in health care premiums and Texas Municipal Retirement System retirement contributions.
The General Fund is the city’s main operating account and pays for activities including public safety, street and infrastructure maintenance, parks and recreation, community development and general government administration.
Property taxes collected go into the city’s General Fund, which makes up 47 percent of Taylor’s revenue for FY 25.
Taylor has established a budget that includes $32,070,459 in expenditures from the General Fund with an expected income of $32,006,622. Wood said the expenditures include costs associated with receiving a grant for firefighters, and if the grant is not approved the budget will have a surplus rather than the current deficit.
Total revenues are expected to be $67,560,022, including other income sources such as the hotel-motel tax, roadway-impact fees and the utility fund.
Total expenditures are budgeted at $66,752,018.
“We’re becoming less dependent on property tax and more dependent on sales-and-use tax,” Wood said. “There’s good and bad in that because if the economy tanks and sales tax goes away, we’re limited on what we can do on tax increases.”
The budget was created based on the council giving a nod to the voter approval rate of 59.1368 cents per $100 of property value, which the city would be able to apply to $2,583,570,200 in valuations.
This amount is provided to the city by Williamson County, so city staff knows how much money they will have to potentially work with before they set the budget and tax rate, planners said.
With this taxable property valuation, city revenues increase $258,357 for every penny the tax rate goes up. So the staff is able to easily determine how much to increase the budget based on how many cents can legally be raised in taxes above the no-new-revenue rate, officials said.
“The city gets about 95 percent of the complaints about people’s tax bills, but we only get about 28 percent of the dollars. We are not the major reason why somebody’s tax bill is so high,” Woods said.
For example, officials said, Taylor Independent School District taxes account for 52 percent of a Taylor propertyowner’s tax burden, with the county receiving 19 percent and the Lower Brushy Creek taxing district receiving 1 percent.
With rises in Taylor’s taxable property value, which includes large new developments, the tax rate needed to achieve the same revenue from a property as the previous year will drop to equal out, officials said.
The city is limited by state law regarding how much total increases it can place on property owners. So even though the city is collecting more money, the tax rate itself has dropped over the years.
“We don’t spend like drunken sailors. We really go over the budget, each department head goes over their budget with a fine-tooth comb and they can tell you where every dime goes,” said Mayor Dwayne Ariola.
The proposed tax rate will raise $914,428 more in taxes than the no-new-revenue rate would raise. It generates $2,924,500 more in total property taxes than last year’s budget even though the tax rate is lower.
