Put On Your Property Tax Caps
For anyone who thinks tax caps are still a bad idea, allow me to share this bit of information with you.
Monday was a meeting of the Indiana Distressed Unit Appeals Board, it’s the body that allows local governments to raise their property tax caps if they can prove a sufficient enough hardship case.
Get a load of this, for all the crying of poverty and gloom and doom because of the tax caps, out of more than 2600 units of local government in Indiana who depend on property taxes, only two showed up asking for increases in the tax caps; the city of Gary and the Beech Grove Library District.
Both were turned down. The Mayor of Gary may have had better luck saying the city was going broke had he not shown up in a Hummer H3, leased by the city. By the way, Gary just signed a new lease for the Hummer at a cost to the taxpayers of nearly $30,000.
Beech Grove tried to argue that the tax caps will force them to eliminate computer services and people won’t be able to play games on them. Somehow I think consolidation is in Beech Grove’s future.
And before I forget, there was one unit of local government that almost showed up thinking its revenue was going to be cut seven percent because of the tax caps, but it turns out the officials read the paperwork wrong, and the municipality was only losing seven dollars.
Wow, this sure is a lot of gloom and doom.
January 6th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
The Beech Grove Library is a nutty bunch, they built that huge new building, and it’s got computers, and it’s got a restaurant inside. It’s almost impossible for a restaurant to stay in business on Main Street in the Grove.
Fifty years from now we’re gonna wonder why we built all these libraries, to store electronic books ?
January 7th, 2009 at 12:06 am
Distressed units are symptomatic of failed testicular / ovarian fortitude; primarily a hardship for taxpayers. Forgetting the “original intent” of the tax “caps” will be easy for those retired from office, living outside “comment,” at the taxpayer funded coral, 401K. The assessment system is an unconstitutional revenue escalator, based not on market value which is a transaction, but avariciously based on unqualified (disinterested & therefore perversely & not legitimately interested), third party opinions about market value; designed to obscure the self serving greed of bureaucrats or self-fancied “royals,” bent on taking from subjects (all too frequently & pathologically, in the name of “education”), not giving to or serving, constituents.
January 7th, 2009 at 12:34 am
So when do the distressed tax payers get an opportunity to present their individual cases to a board? If government has an opportunity to prove why they need more, shouldn’t the taxpayers have an opportunity to prove why more is too much?
January 7th, 2009 at 1:12 am
TAX & SPEND is the motto of The Democrat Machine!
January 7th, 2009 at 3:57 am
I think that right now “local gov.” is doing all it can to stay under the radar. The “big guns” are out and they are trying to not be a target. All that is, except the Washington Twp. board. I guess they think they are immune to all this.
January 7th, 2009 at 8:34 am
Hardly a week went by in 2008 without a news item about some city mayor projecting a budget holocaust. But where are the whiners now who claimed the sky was falling? Beech Grove needs prozac, and the Gary officials need a correctional facility; not dough. All the other rats must have found a way through the hardship maze, or they would still be standing in line this morning.
January 7th, 2009 at 11:20 am
The simple fact is that there are plenty of cuts that could be made. For starters, what is so wrong with scaling back on lawn cutting at parks? What about giving zero dollars to the arts for a year or two. The next thing some places could do is stop being so fancy with their government buildings, welcome signs, etc.. Lastly, there is a lot of fat that could be cut in both police and fire services. Too many “well, s/he did the job for 15 years, so lets reward them with an ‘inside job’.” Some of these inside, “riding a desk” jobs could be done by civilians. Plus, it seems that even if a police “supervisor” is not supervising officers, but civilians, they still need a rank above patrol. Why? With fire, there are a lot of the same people given some easy street job because they have 20 years on and are about 50-100 pounds heavier than when they started.
January 7th, 2009 at 11:32 am
Computers at the library used for playing games? Not any more. At my library in a high employment rate county all computers are in use all the time by unemployed workers who, in order to receive benefits, must file weekly and can only file online. We have added extra staff and extra computers to deal with demand. I advise you not to go to one of our branches on a Sunday – the first day of the filing week – unless you want to make your way through the mob to find your book.
Public Library use always increases when the economy is bad. With now mandatory online filing in Indiana it is even worse.
Yes you could go to the workforce offices, that is if you could find a parking place. All day dozens of cars are parked on sidewalks and lawns around that office. Then you can stand in line for hours to use one of their computers to file.