Posted on 03/05/2015 11:37:39 AM PST by Phillyred
Mayor Nutter will ask City Council on Thursday to approve a 9.3 percent increase in property taxes to fund the beleaguered School District.
In his final budget address as mayor, Nutter will ask Council - in an election year - to approve a $3.95 billion spending plan that would raise property owners' taxes by hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year.
Currently, the tax bill for a home assessed at the median of $113,000 is $1,112. If Nutter's proposal was approved, it would go up to $1,216.
Details of the budget were disclosed to Council members Wednesday morning in a three-page brief that was subsequently obtained by The Inquirer. The administration declined to comment on the record about the budget, saying it would wait until the mayor's address....
(Excerpt) Read more at philly.com ...
The chitty of Philthydelphia is trying to extort a $140.oo parking ticket from me. I temporarily parked in front of the Rodeway Inn downtown to check in. I didn’t see the no parking sign. They almost towed the vehicle away but still slapped me with a ticket. Charge me $20.oo I’ll pay for ‘my mistake’. Instead they won’t work with me and keep sending me threatening letters to collect the extortion.
They won’t get a dime and they can go- you- know - what themselves.
I moved from PA to WA. In PA you don’t get to vote on tax increases. My property tax for a home that we sold for 250,000 was over 6 thousand. I paid the exact same 250,000 for my new home in WA, where my property tax is under 3000. PA has a 4% earned income tax, which means that you send in 4 percent of what you earn. Add in another local 1% local earned income tax, and we were paying over 6 thousand in income taxes. In WA, the income tax is zero. My home and car insurance in PA was over 3000/year. In WA, I pay half that. My water bill in PA was 70-80/month, and the electric/gas bill was 300. WA has the lowest electric rates in 50 states, I pay about 150 for water and electric, and 50 for gas. Overall, I am saving about 10 thousand per year by moving.
I am in 5 figures for property taxes.
“I have always enjoyed hearing the Philadelphia Mayor’s last name.”
Funny, when I hear it, I think maybe he used to work on a hog farm!
The school districts are not "beleaguered." In NJ (as in PA) a great deal of the tax money is sucked up by pensions.
“NJ had the same problem until our property tax increases were capped at 2%; now when teachers get 5% raises a bunch of young untenured parasites lose their jobs...”
Here in California, thanks to Prop 13, we’ve had our property taxes capped at 1% for 30 years. So thanks to this proposition, we can stay in our home now that we are retired.
I know a few of the overpaid protected education administration types and they could be canned and nobody would notice. Some even get a bonus no matter what.
The unionized public school system is 25 -35 years behind the times. Long ago the country should have eliminated tenure, paid for performance, eliminated the departments of education, and allowed for competition thru choice.
I should also have added that they cannot increase assessed valuation more than 2% per year. And during the economic downturn, when housing values here plummeted, people were able to go to the assessor and get their taxes reduced based on the decreased value of their homes. Our daughter had her home’s assessed value reduced by $100,000 because they had recently purchased it so it was overvalued substantially.
Well, all I can say is that PA sucks worse than WA.
I hope you realize we’re still a pretty blue state.
BTW, I live in Pierce county. Where are you?
This is discrimination. People who own homes are being made to pay a tax that renters don’t have to pay. Where’s the ACLU?????
Tri cities.
Well, that’s east of the Cascades and essentially a different state.
Be glad you don’t live near Seattle or Tacoma.
Wonder why they call him a nutter?
That’s a big problem here in NJ (retirement); your taxes will be frozen when you’re 65, but they are frozen at such a high level already they would eat up too much of your monthly income. As a result, retirees flee, and are replaced by young immigrants who add schoolchildren (driving those costs higher).
Property tax caps are a Band-Aid applied to a gaping wound; a friend who live in CA for years described how settled areas deteriorated due to the caps (because they cut into services), and prospective homebuyers shied from those areas because they would buy in at a higher tax level than the existing residents (a new neighbor could pay twice as much as you for the same exact home, property lot, etc.). Instead, a new development would spring up further down the road (in another municipality), and the oldest areas would suffer.
Here in NJ there isn’t much land left develop; there is nowhere “down the road”, so those prospective buyers simply cross the Delaware River and live in PA. Lower costs (for now) in exchange for longer commutes; it doesn’t bode well for NJ...
Here in NJ it is difficult to lower your taxes through appeal; you have to find comparable properties paying less, and that isn’t easy.
Property tax caps let you keep the home instead of facing foreclosure; in the end you might not sell the home...
That is the achilles heel of Prop 13. In it's effort to keep people from being taxed out of their homes ( particularly for retirees who may not have the resources to stay on at the higher rates), the law essentially slowed the turnover in places where incomes are lower. Here where we live, home are quite expensive and incomes of residents, and future residents are high enough that there isn't a big problem with affordability. As an example, we build our home in 1983. Home values in the area are now around $ 2million. The home across the road just sold for $2.1million. The taxes the former owner paid on the home for which he paid something on the order of $1.5 million, were in the neighborhood of $18,000 per year. OTOH, our taxes are around $7,000 since we've been here for more than 30 years. The real problem is that the property tax, should be relegated to paying just for property-related services, but today they are mostly comprised of taxes to support public schools and county government, but making the needed changes are too hard for today's legislators. They are happier legislating plastic grocery bags out of existence, messing with gun laws and other de minimus acts where courage isn't required.
I think a big problem is that when you sell your home, the prospective buyer will face much higher taxes.
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