Link to Council meeting tonight to set the FY17 tax rate.   If you ever watched any other City Council meeting in prior years when the tax rates are set, you did not have to watch tonight.  To understand why the vote was postponed, we wrote about it on November 28th.

There are two major revenues numbers for the FY17 budget:

  1. Property Tax Levy
  2. Local Receipts

In FY16 budget there was $40,750,100 budgeted for Local Receipts. In the last last City Council meeting under 15D), it was reported that revenues collected estimates by $5,400,000. In particular check out:

  • Motor Vehicle Excise receipts exceeded estimates by $2,100,000.
  • License and Permit receipts exceeded estimates by $1,100,000.

Approximately the same number ($39,6495) was budgeted for Local receipts in FY17.  If the estimates for FY16 are coming in higher then we expected, do we not need to review the number the number that has been budgeted for FY17?

Why does this make a difference?  If we were to increase the budgeted number for Local Receipts in FY17 by $2,400,00, then we would be able to reduce the amount of monies to be raised from the Property Tax Levy by $2,400,000, benefitting all tax-payers (commercial and residential).

Now that it looks like this estimate will be adjusted, the vote was put off  so that the tables now have to be rerun reflecting a lowering in the tax levy due to the increased Local Receipts estimate.