Cape County property tax rate to see little change

The Cape Girardeau County Commission approved property tax rates Monday that will change only slightly from a year ago.

The county government’s general-fund tax rate will rise to 5.06 cents per $100 assessed valuation, a 1.57-cent increase.

But the tax rate for the Senate Bill 40 board, which oversees tax funding for a sheltered workshop for people with developmental disabilities, decreased by 2.19 cents to a levy of 5.53 cents, county officials said.

The property tax rate for senior services (4.78 cents) and mental health services (7.72 cents) will remain the same as a year ago.

Assuming no difference in assessed valuation, taxpayers will see a slight decrease when the four tax levies are added, officials said.

Presiding Commissioner Clint Tracy said the levy change will draw little attention from taxpayers.

“In most cases, it is not noticeable. This year, the overall decrease will go unnoticed,” he said.

Combined, the four levies total just over 23 cents per $100 assessed valuation.

Tracy said Cape Girardeau County has some of the lowest property taxes in the nation.

Taxpayers pay no levy for the county’s road and bridge operations, Tracy said.

They are funded with sales-tax money.

“This county has some of the best county roads in the state,” he said.

The commission approved the tax rates for 2016 after a public hearing in the county administration building in Jackson.

No one attended the hearing other than county officials.

First District Associate Commissioner Paul Koeper said he was “satisfied with the rates.”

He said the county’s general-fund property tax stays low because of a voter-approved measure that requires the commission to reduce the property tax annually by 50 percent of the sales tax collected.

“Basically, the tax rate was set by the voters in 1979,” Koeper said.

The general-fund levy varies from year to year as a result of changes in assessed valuation and differences between what was collected in sales tax the previous year and what was estimated in calculating the rate, officials said.

School-district taxes account for most of the property taxes paid by county residents, commissioners said.

Total property tax rates, which include city and school district levies, in Cape Girardeau range from $5.78 per $100 assessed valuation in the Whitewater area to a rate of $3.79 in the Meadow Heights school area, county Treasurer Rodger Hudson said.

Tracy said the county-government levy is less than 1 percent of the total property tax rate.

An owner of a home valued at $100,000 will have a county general-fund tax bill of $9.61 this year, compared to $6.63 in 2015, or less than a $3 increase, Hudson said.

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