I tuned in to parts of the Town of Vienna Town Council meeting last night, on Verizon channel 38, to listen to their legally-required public hearing on the property tax rate for the coming year.
There’s a simple question that citizens want to know: How much are real estate taxes going up, in the coming year?
And the answer, from the Town of Vienna, was, figure it out yourself.
Which, although it may somehow satisfy the letter of the law, is the exact opposite of the clear intent of Commonwealth statute.
An apparently pointless Virginia law
The Commonwealth of Virginia requires that any government entity that charges property taxes must inform its citizens about the increase in taxes from year to year. (As long as total taxes are expected to increase by at least one percent.) There’s a standard notice, with a calculation and language set out in statute. The whole point of which is to combine the increase in assessments with any change in tax rates, and tell the citizens the bottom line on how much their real estate tax bills will rise, on average.
But every year, the Town manages to goof up the math on that legally-required notice. See, e.g., Post #1495, for the 2022 notice. They literally get the math wrong, year after year. And, so far, they have always understated the actual increase in taxes that would occur based on the proposed tax rate.
I post about that every year. Each year, the Town posts a notice that does not comply with the statute, because it does not do the calculation correctly. (The details of the calculation are laid out in statute, shown at this reference). Each year, the Town ignores it.
This year, we continued that long-standing tradition. The 5.4% increase, underlined below, is actually an 8.4% increase, based on the numbers shown. Roughly speaking, the 9.7% increase in assessments, less the 1.2% reduction in the tax rate, leads to an approximate 8.4% increase in total real estate taxes.
If you had an interest in the Town’s legally mandated public hearing on the tax rate, this is the document the Town showed you (reference). For purposes of that hearing, as a citizen, you’d think that the new tax rate was going to be 0.2025 cents per $100 of assessed value, and that taxes were going up an average of 5.4%.
But in addition, as of two weeks ago, at the Town’s public hearing on the budget, the Town also knew that the tax rate stated in that notice was incorrect. The Town wasn’t going to proposed a new tax rate of .2025 cents, but instead Town staff had already figured out that they could balance the budget with a new rate of 0.1950.
The bottom line is that none of the numbers in that legally-mandated notice to citizens was correct. Except for the increase in assessments, which comes from Fairfax County. Based on the tax rate shown in the document, the percentage increase in total taxes was a math error. The numbers supporting that estimated increase were incorrectly calculated. And, in addition, the tax rate for the coming year had itself changed weeks before the public hearing.
But nobody felt the least obligation to change or correct anything. Or even note that they were wrong, in the public hearing.
Which leads to an obvious question: If the numbers in that legally-mandated notice don’t have to be correct — if the stated tax rate isn’t the rate the Town is planning to use, and if the stated increase in total taxes (and subsidiary calculated figure) isn’t even calculated correctly — then what, exactly, is the point of the law that requires it? You can use any tax rate that’s in the ballpark, and do the arithmetic wrong, and … well, basically offer a page full of misinformation as the background to your public hearing. And … that satisfies the letter of the law?
I guess so. I have to wonder of the folks who wrote that piece of the statute realized that this would be the bottom line. It literally appears to make no difference whether the numbers in that document bear any relationship to reality or not.
Answering the question, even if nobody cares.
Not that it really matters here, because the citizens are indifferent. Routinely, the public hearings on taxes, water-and-sewer rates, and the budget draw no public comment. Literally, nobody cares enough about it to say anything.
Anyway, if you listened to last night’s public hearing, you still wouldn’t have been told what the proposed increase in total taxes is. Amidst all the back-patting, and the emphasis in cutting the rate (while increasing the assessments), nobody bothered to inform the citizens what their average increase in real estate taxes will be. I think that just underscores how little this seems to matter, in this increasingly wealthy town.
In any case, 1.097*(0.1950/0.2050) =~ 1.043, or a 4.3 percent increase in real estate taxes, on average, for the coming year. That’s what I calculate. That’s the increase in assessments, times the reduction in the tax rate. Not that anybody cares.
The bottom line is that the Commonwealth enacted a rule requiring entities such as the Town of Vienna to tell citizens how much tax bills were going up, on average. The Town has to provide a document combining the increase in assessments with any change in the tax rate. And the Town does that. The only problems are that the document bears no relationship to the actual increase in taxes. And it’s still up to the citizens to calculate, for themselves, what this year’s increase in taxes will be.
