Cape Girardeau County residents will see property taxes go up in November

When Cape Girardeau County property tax bills start appearing in mailboxes in November, many people in the county will need to dig a little deeper to cover the costs.

While only one taxing jurisdiction -- Delta School District -- held an election where voters approved higher taxes, 17 other jurisdictions are also increasing their levies. For almost all those jurisdictions, the higher rates are being imposed to recapture revenue that would otherwise be lost to falling personal property values.

The other exception is Cape Girardeau School District, which returned tax rates to 2006 levels. The tax rate was lowered in 2007 because of a clerical error that reported the wrong rate to the county, with a resulting loss of $700,000 in revenue.

For jurisdictions that increased taxes, the rates are going up anywhere from about one-quarter of 1 percent to just more than 4 percent. The increases will add between a few pennies to a few dollars to the taxes paid on a $150,000 home.

By raising rates, the taxing jurisdictions -- which include school districts, public libraries, fire protection districts and city governments -- are taking advantage of the mechanisms in state law that usually work to lower tax rates when property values rise.

"It would stop at the maximum amount voters had authorized," said Becky Webb, local government supervisor in the State Auditor Susan Montee's office. Tax rates "will trickle down from reassessments, and when the opposite occurs it will trickle back up."

Tax rates vary year to year based on a formula included in the tax limitation provisions of the Missouri Constitution. Those limits, commonly called the Hancock Amendment, require tax rates to be cut when property values rise faster than inflation. The limit excludes the value of new construction.

This year, however, the value of personal property -- cars, boats and manufacturing equipment are examples -- fell by $5.7 million in Cape Girardeau County, to $203.9 million. The assessed value of all taxable property in the county, excluding new construction, fell about $4 million.

Including new construction, assessed value of the county was $1.05 billion this year compared to $1.03 billion in 2007.

For residents of Cape Girardeau, tax rates for general revenue, the health department and the public library all increased, each by a little more than 1 percent. The reduction in personal property value is tied to three events, county officials told the city -- the loss of Dana Corp. and its manufacturing equipment, a state tax change that allows faster depreciation of business equipment and a slowdown in the number of new cars being purchased and added to the tax rolls.

If the city had left tax rates unchanged, it would have had to cover a $14,000 shortfall in the $1.55 million in general revenue expected from property taxes in the current budget year, city finance director John Richbourg said. With the tax increase, the city will receive $5,000 more than budgeted for general revenue from property taxes.

"We have always set it to what the law allows because usually it is a decrease rather than an increase," Richbourg said. "We are generating about the same revenue as proposed in our budget."

Last year, tax rates for the city fell 4.6 percent following reassessment.

One of the largest percentage increases in the county will be for taxpayers in the Nell Holcomb School District. The 4.2 percent increase in the Nell Holcomb tax rate -- to $3.2074 per $100 assessed valuation -- follows a 2.6 percent decline in 2007 caused by reassessment.

The district keeps its tax rate at the legal maximum because it fluctuates up and down each year, superintendent Darryl Pannier said. In addition, the district doesn't want to get caught by a new law that requires taxing jurisdictions to cut rates during reassessment years even when the tax being levied is below the legal maximum.

"I think our thought on the matter was that it has been pretty volatile here in the Nell Holcomb School District," Pannier said.

The new law may be having an unintended effect, and Pannier said he has been keeping abreast of discussions in Jefferson City about the law's implications. "Overall, the scary thing about it is if we had kept the rate at $3.07, if that was going to be our new ceiling, who knows where we would be next year?"

rkeller@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 126