Growls

In a September 8, 2004 memo to the county government’s department heads (available at the Arlington County Civic Federation's website), the Manager noted that “real estate assessment growth is approaching 20% for the fourth year in a row . . . (and that for) CY 2000, residential homeowners paid 49% of the real estate taxes and commercial owners paid 51%. The residential percentage is expected to increase to 60% in CY 2005 due to the rapid residential assessment growth coupled with much slower growth in commercial property assessments, shifting the tax burden further to the residential homeowner.”

Now comes further evidence of how all property owners (residential and commercial) are bearing the burden of paying for the County Board’s unwillingness or inability to control the county budget. The new audited financial statements (Comprehensive Annual Financial Report) for FY 2005 were released on Saturday (no permalink, yet, but will soon be posted here). Data from pages 160 and 162 shows that the share of general government spending paid by general property taxes has gradually increased from 48.1% in 1995 to 54.6% in 2005. Detail numbers follow (second and third colums are millions of dollars):

Fiscal Year/Gnl Property Taxes/Total Gng Govt Expenditures

1995/222.4/462.2/48.1%
1996/229.7/478.4/48.0%
1997/243.1/491.5/49.5%
1998/253.2/501.7/50.5%
1999/265.3/532.3/49.8%
2000/283.5/558.1/50.8%
2001/308.5/594.9/51.9%
2002/339.0/653.7/51.9%
2003/371.6/713.6/52.1%
2004/405.2/745.8/54.3%
2005/432.3/792.1/54.6%

Isn’t it nice to live in a caring community and be able to observe income redistribution occur right before your eyes?

Other tax revenue sources in addition to general property taxes include local sales taxes, local cigarette, transient, bank stock, recordation, commericial utility, and meals taxes. Non-tax revenue sources include licenses, permits, charges for services, and fines.