Indiana

Put On Your Property Tax Caps

By Abdul Hakim-Shabazz

For anyone who thinks tax caps are still a bad idea, allow me to share this bit of information with you.

Monday was a meeting of the Indiana Distressed Unit Appeals Board, it’s the body that allows local governments to raise their property tax caps if they can prove a sufficient enough hardship case.

Get a load of this, for all the crying of poverty and gloom and doom because of the tax caps, out of more than 2600 units of local government in Indiana who depend on property taxes, only two showed up asking for increases in the tax caps; the city of Gary and the Beech Grove Library District.

Both were turned down.  The Mayor of Gary may have had better luck saying the city was going broke had he not shown up in a Hummer H3, leased by the city.  By the way, Gary just signed a new lease for the Hummer at a cost to the taxpayers of nearly $30,000.

Beech Grove tried to argue that the tax caps will force them to eliminate computer services and people won’t be able to play games on them.  Somehow I think consolidation is in Beech Grove’s future.

And before I forget, there was one unit of local government that almost showed up thinking its revenue was going to be cut seven percent because of the tax caps, but it turns out the officials read the paperwork wrong, and the municipality was only losing seven dollars.

Wow, this sure is a lot of gloom and doom.

Full post as published by Indiana Barrister on January 06, 2009 (boomark / email).