Hopefully by now you’ve heard that a property revaluation of X% isn’t going to translate into a tax increase of X%. They are two different things, and the tax rate is going to drop such that the change is revenue neutral.
I have written a lot about that – so today instead I want to talk about a few other consequences of the property reval that aren’t as obvious.
Costs for Car Registration Renewal Will Go Down
So, it turns out that the high cost of car registration renewal is actually because property tax get assessed on vehicles as well. With home valuations going up, and tax rates going down, and car vehicle values staying the same or going down, we’re going to see a large decrease in car registration costs starting next year.
This Revaluation Favors Residential
Residential properties have gone up in value more than commercial values have. This is the opposite of what we saw in 2020. This means that the overall tax burden has shifted slightly away from commercial and towards residential (which is generally considered bad). This, again, is the opposite of what happened in 2020 when the tax burden shifted more commercial.
There isn’t much we can do about this; the property values are the property values and are determined by the market. But towns like Apex can be more intentional about shifting to more commercial zoning where it makes sense.
Policies Which Shift Costs Out of General Fund Are Good, Actually
I hope this revaluation process highlights the fact that things funded by property taxes (most anything in the general fund) are regressive by nature. That’s not great.
The alternative is to pull things out of the general funded and utilize other funding sources, where possible. Those sources of funding may have more flexibility in how they are structured, so they are not necessarily as regressive as property taxes. The best example of this I can think of is when we created the Stormwater utility a few years ago.
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