How to balance the Pulaski County Assessor’s budget is expected to be a topic of discussion when the county council holds its public budget hearing tonight. Assessor Holly VanDerAa has been asking council members to think about raising the reassessment tax, to help keep up with rising costs. But they had decided to wait for an analysis of the county’s finances that’s currently under consideration.
However, during last week’s meeting, VanDerAa said she’s already built the increase into next year’s budget proposal. “This impacts my budget for next year,” she said. “And my budget, right now, for Reassessment will fall very short, which means when I submit two budgets out of the General and out of the Reassessment, it’s got to come out of one or the other because of the obligations that we have with contracts and such.”
VanDerAa said that if the reassessment tax isn’t raised from 0.0132 percent to 0.0175, the Reassessment Fund would have a deficit of about $43,000 next year. That would have to be covered out of the county’s General Fund.
But council members were still hesitant to make the change last week. Ken Boswell said he wanted to wait for a comprehensive fiscal plan before the council starts changing tax rates. “Can we do it for another year the way we’ve been doing it, even though it isn’t the optimum way, look at what the plan’s going to be, and then say, ‘Okay, now we know how to change the whole mechanism and do it one time’?” he asked. “I just get in fear of when we start dropping things off the taxes and we start raising another one here, that we’re going to end up doing a bunch of stuff like this and then we’re going to turn around and try to level it all out, and we’re redoing it for a third time.”
But beyond that, council member Mike Tiede wondered what the actual problem was with the way the reassessment budget is currently set up. “But I still don’t understand,” he said. “If we take a dollar out of Reassessment or a dollar out of the General Fund, the same people pay the dollar.”
VanDerAa is expected to discuss her 2019 budget proposal in more detail during tonight’s public hearing. It starts at 6:00 EDT at the Pulaski County Highway Garage.
