Thoughts on property tax rate hikes

I have been in touch with my elected town officials regarding the proposed budget for Selma. The vote on the budget is today. I highly recommend all citizens getting active enough in their community to take part in their town, as well as county, state, and federal governments. Contact your elected representatives when you have concerns, questions, and comments. It is how you learn and make your voice heard.

I am going to give credit where credit is due. I have always had great interaction with Eric Sellers, who was appointed to fill an open slot on the town council and then beat me last election for that seat. My personal opinions aside as to how he was appointed to the position in his first, partial term, I must say that overall, I have been pleased with how he approaches his job as a council member. Eric has always been pleasant and responsive in my dealings and communications with him. Thank you, Eric, your efforts are appreciated by me if not by anyone else.

I am not going to share my entire conversation with him here, but I did share what I had written previously on this very blog. What I do want to share is some research I did. I have written previously about my best frame of reference, the town where I grew up. I was fairly involved for a teenager in town affairs. I was a stringer reporter for the local radio station, I was involved with youth government programs every year in school, I knew the town manager, and I was in the fire department's youth program. If you search my archives, you may see that I reference Franklin, New Hampshire from time to time. That is my point of reference, since the town is almost comparable to Selma.

I called and spoke to Franklin's town assessor's office after reading the tax rate on their web site. I inquired as to what the tax rate included, and she clued me in that this was the total property tax burden on real estate for all state, county, and town taxation. I ran some numbers. I emailed the following to my town council member.

I wanted to share a bit of info with you regarding tax rates. I grew up in a town about the size of Selma in population. They are now not far off from us, about 8,000 people now. I was researching the tax rate in the town. That town has a property tax rate of $18.04 per thousand valuation. That includes the share for the state and the county as well as the town. I was crunching some numbers. Assuming that my house was suddenly transplanted into that town and had the same tax value of $80,840 (according to the Johnston County appraisal card available online on the county web site), my taxes in NH would be $1458.35 per year. Here in Selma, the taxes are $1.27 per hundred valuation. The equates to $1026.67. You may think that hey, the Selma taxes are a lot less, $431.68 per year less. However, once you take into consideration the fact that in my example, NH has NO state income and NO state sales tax, you can see the disparity in effective tax rates. Do I pay more than $431 in income and sales tax each year? You better believe it. Sure, my home would be higher in appraised tax value in NH, but for the sake of comparison, I am comparing dollar value to same dollar value. That is the inherent evil in property taxation (the ethics of property taxation is a whole discussion for a whole other time). In raising 4 cents, my property taxes would only go up $32.33 per year for Selma. I personally will never miss that money. I spend that on two people at Edelweiss for dinner. However, it is the principle of the thing. When does it stop?

I have known for a long time that we in NC were getting hosed on taxes.

I wonder if we will ever see this concept again in Selma

I am a firm believer in the idea that with any budget much larger than the average household, there is wasteful spending. I find areas that I could trim in my own spending. When it comes to government, I find it especially true. I have seen wasteful spending in corporate America as well as in government.

What I find interesting is how budgets are handled in different locations. I found a news article about the town where my mother resides, Bow, NH. The town had a meeting and they actually trimmed the town budget by $400,000. Bow is about the same size as Selma. There is about a $50,000 median income difference between the two towns, however.

Anyway, here is an excerpt from the article.

Bow finally took care of business last night, as residents gathered to finish voting on the annual town meeting warrant. Last night's meeting was a continuation from two weeks ago, when long debate over the annual budget delayed action on the rest of the warrant.

At that meeting, residents voted to trim the proposed budget by about $400,000, from $8.3 million to $7.9 million. Last night's meeting held little such drama, with the votes moving along efficiently and swiftly.

In Bow, the town residents are much more involved in the town decision taking than here in Selma. Perhaps that is why they were able to cut the budget so much. Food for thought.

Eye opening video capturing the fraud of ballot security in NH

The attitude of the public officials, the pathetic security measures, the pathetic security tape, and the whole process makes me wonder about voting security around the country. Sad.

Looking at the NH primary numbers

I was checking out the primary ballot results for New Hampshire. Rudy Giuliani is not doing so well after two primary elections. Ron Paul got only about 2000 votes less than he did in NH. Tom Tancredo might as well hang it up. He got just 66 votes in the entire state. "No name" candidates we never heard of got a bunch more votes than he did. Write in candidates got about 4700 more votes than he did. Duncan Hunter announced he would stay in the race, but it is a lost cause. Here are the numbers. The numbers there differ slightly from CNN's numbers.