North Platte Telegraph on June 15: Finger pointing won’t fix tax problem
It is finger-pointing season again. As our local governing bodies go about their budgeting processes, we’ve started to hear the perennial accusations that our property tax woes are the fault of locally elected board members failing to hold the line on spending. And what better target than school boards, whose budgets account for about half of the property taxes we pay? But the truth is that spending cuts in our public schools can provide only minimal property tax relief.
To understand the extent to which school spending cuts can reduce property taxes, some arithmetic is unavoidable. In an effort to minimize too much math-induced eye glazing, and for ease in calculation, roughly rounded numbers from North Platte Public School’s budget can be used as an example. To pay operating expenses, NPPSD collects roughly $20 million in property taxes through a levy of approximately $1 per $100 of valuation. Let’s say the district cut an administrator’s salary by $10,000, always a politically popular bit of demagoguery. That reduction would roughly reduce the property tax need by .05 percent and shave 50 cents from the annual tax bill on a $100,000 house.