Battle Ground School Bond – Tax Rates vs. Taxes

Summary:

A $350,000 home, with all changes to tax rates, will see an estimated reduction of ~$196 in taxes for 2019. In 2020 taxes appear to rise by ~$420. The net change (combining 2019 and 2020) = an increase of $224 over the two years. No matter how you look at the numbers it appears taxes (regardless of tax rates) continue to rise as long as assessed values rise.

Details and Background

The District/School Board are saying that the 2019 tax rate will drop. In doing so they imply that taxes will go down as well. They don’t address 2020 and beyond. To complicate things the District/Board have included the one time (1x) reduction in property taxes in 2019 (it goes back up in 2020). On top of this is the continued rise in assessed property values.

In an attempt to come up with a way to help people sort through this I created a spreadsheet tool. To open this you need Microsoft Office Excel or you can download and install the free LibreOffice Suite. The spreadsheet is attached to this post for you to download and use.   

What does the spreadsheet allow? I went to the Clark County Assessors website and opened our property tax statement. We are in unincorporated Clark County. I then created a spreadsheet to duplicate the line items. I did truncate the number of decimal places in each item so the actual amount won’t be exact.

The fields in GREEN can be changed. You can choose the assessed value for 2018 (I used $350,000 because that’s about the median home price in Clark County). You can change the assessed value increase (I used 10% because that’s been the average of the last 2-3 years and 2018 is tracking at ~10.6% based on the February RMLS report). You can also change the Fire tax rate since that seems to vary around the school district. You can also change the levy rate. The current approved max rate is $1.50/$1000 but the legislature is being asked to increase that to as much as $2.31/$1000. The rest of the items have minor impact on the taxes so they are fixed (unchangeable). Any City taxes would be on top of these.

What about levy changes? The old levy system finishes this year (2018) and the spreadsheet shows that. Starting in 2019 the new levy kicks in. As noted above it’s set at $1.50/$1000 but could rise. The spreadsheet accounts for $1.50 if you leave it unchanged.

Do not use this tool expecting it to be exact. It’s intended to let each person look at their situation and get a sense of the direction of the taxes. It’s important to understand that tax rates remaining flat or even slightly declining don’t always mean lower taxes.

Here’s the bond spreadsheet:   BGSD Tax Projections 2019-2020 vs 2018_v2