By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
Val Verde County Commissioners Court members voted unanimously Tuesday to lower the county property tax rate for the coming year.
The court met in special session to allow County Tax Assessor Collector Elodia Garcia to formally present the proposed tax rate for the coming year to the court and for the court to vote on that proposed rate, to set a date for a hearing on the tax rate and to set dates for a hearing on and approval of the proposed 2022-2023 county budget.
After Garcia announced the proposed county tax rate for the coming year, County Judge Lewis G. Owens Jr. noted the county tax rate for the current year is .5121 per $100 of property valuation.
Owens said the county tax rate being proposed for the coming year is .4977 per $100 of property valuation.
“From what I’ve preliminary looked at, the budget does look pretty good. There’s some things we’ll discuss as we go through the budget process, but I do appreciate you lowering the tax rate for the people, especially considering the economy right now,” County Commissioner Pct. 3 Beau Nettleton commented after the judge finished his presentation on the tax rate.
County Commissioner Pct. 4 Gustavo “Gus” Flores commented, “I think it’s a great thing that we were able to lower the tax rate to help out the people, but the county appraisal office jacked up all of the property values like crazy. Everybody got an increase on their values, some $10,000, so up to $60,000, $70,000, $80,000, from last year to this year.”
“Those wouldn’t be homesteads, then, those would be businesses,” County Auditor Matt Weingardt interjected.
“The good thing on the homesteads is they are capped, so if we go up 20 percent, they’re capped at 10 (percent). You are lowering your rate, so your total tax dollars is less than 10 percent, while your asset is growing at 20 (percent),” Weingardt added.
“You did a heck of a job, judge, on this budget,” County Commissioner Pct. 1 Martin Wardlaw said.
“I can tell you, commissioner, it was really a team effort,” Owens replied, giving special kudos for the work done by Weingardt and his staff, as well as the efforts of Garcia and her staff.
Nettleton then made a motion to set the tax rate at .4977 as proposed, with Flores giving the second. The court voted unanimously to approve the motion.
Following the meeting, Owens said all of the commissioners courts of which he has been a part, both as commissioner and as county judge, have worked hard to keep the county tax rate low.
He noted although he prepares the budget every year, all of the commissioners had input.
“We were able to figure out (a tax rate) that will be a little bit lower, and we could have gone a little bit higher. We still stayed below what we had in this fiscal year, plus we stayed below where we could have been,” Owens said.
He said if the county had raised its tax rate or kept it the same, the extra money raised would have gone into the county’s fund balance “and I just can’t see putting more taxpayers’ dollars into the fund balance, which is a kind of savings account for the county.”
Owens said the county in past years has built up its fund balance and will be using some of the fund balance from the previous year to go into the next fiscal year.
“It’s a structurally sound budget,” Owens said, adding county services will not suffer and raises for county employees have been built into the budget.
Owens said he believed lowering the tax rate was important, especially in light of higher property appraisals this year.
“Is this going to help a lot? No, but we did what we could do, and this court has done a good job taking care of the money,” the county judge said.
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