City Council Recap, 11/26/24: FY25 Tax Levy Presentation with Assessing Department
- Kit Collins
- Nov 27, 2024
- 2 min read
This was a “Special Meeting” with a single topic – to discuss and adopt the City’s Tax Policy for FY25 by classifying the tax levy among the various property types.
Let me take a crack at putting this into something resembling layman’s terms: The Prop 2.5 law and the passage of Questions 7 and 8 (overrides are also governed by Prop 2.5) tell the City exactly how much revenue we are allowed to raise from property taxes, through regulating by how much the overall composite tax rate (levy) may increase. But, cities are granted a limited amount of discretion in deciding how much of that revenue is raised from which type of property (how the pie chart is allocated among residential vs. commercial, industrial, and personal property). That’s what is up for debate and decision at this meeting each year.
For as long as I am aware, Medford has adopted the “Minimum Residential Factor,” meaning that we maximally shift the tax levy to commercial and industrial property owners, and maximally away from residential property owners ( = highest allowed tax rate on commercial, industrial, property; lowest allowed tax rate on residential property). That "minimum" and "maximum" is determined by the state – for example, we can’t tax residential 0% and C-I-P 100%; the state sets a min/max.
We do have the option to tax all the categories at the same flat rate; we’ve never done that for as long as I’ve been on the Council (3 years), and I believe the Minimum Residential Factor been a norm for much longer than that.
Here’s a link to the Assessor’s presentation if folks want to look deeper. It includes a lot of interesting context such as Medford’s average assessed values compared to our neighbors; new growth; fiscal value by property class (residential vs. commercial etc).
Kommentare