Home values rising on St. Paul's East Side. So will taxes.

On St. Paul's East Side, homeowners in the 1900 block of Hawthorne Avenue are in line for property tax increases of 40 percent or more -- an additional $430 on their tax bills. Property owners along the 700 block of Summit Avenue will see just as much in savings.

The city's middle-class property owners will feel the biggest bite in their wallet come tax time, and nowhere more so than on the city's East Side.

After years of mild tax breaks, the owners of median-value homes in St. Paul likely will do a double-take when "Truth in Taxation" statements arrive in November. Residential property values finally are climbing, and property taxes will, too.

Even before proposed levy increases are factored in, county officials say many owners of homes with taxable market values of $145,000 next year will pay an added $112, with wide variations by neighborhood.

Suprisingly a very mixed group protested this - tried to get enough signatures to get it placed on the november ballot but the lesbian mayors office fought it and got a bunch of signatures declared bogus....the black clergy of houston are not happy about it at all.

The first time a convicted child molester is found in the women's restroom and just claims to be "transgendered" or confused about his sexuality, I hope the city is sued and the mayor named as an accesory

Ah, but you do not understand how the principle of ad valorem real estate taxes work.

The system is divided into two parts. One is the “assessed value”, based more or less loosely on what the history of the market transactions have been for similar properties in recent years. When the real estate market has been depressed for several years, the valuation on the “assessed value” tends to decrease, more or less in lockstep. But the revenue needs of the governing authority keep going on, so there has to be a “finagle factor” applied to the taxes.

Each $1,000 of the assessed property value is assigned a “mill rate”, that is, how many dollars per $1,000 valuation will be charged on all the properties in the entire taxation district. This is where things sort of get figured out backwards. The taxing authority (or authorities, as there may be several) determines how much revenue they need, then this is divided up by however many thousands of dollars of valuation is in the district. Then presto magico, the “mill rate” is determined.

If the valuation drops, the mill rate has to be raised, unless there is restraint on the budget (and if you believe this is going to happen, then the Easter Bunny will surely visit you, come spring). But once the mill rate exceeds $40 per $1,000, there shall be large squawks from the payers of the taxes, and thus, another solution has to be found, in “equalizations”. The nominal valuation is RAISED, and therefore the RATE may be reduced, even though more real dollars in taxes may be collected on that particular piece of property. Once the assessed values get pumped up to a sufficient level, then the “mill rate” drops to a relatively low level, and (almost) everybody is happy.

Except, of course, for the poor shlub that sees his tax bill going up year over year, and he is still living in the same house he bought for a quarter of its present valuation 20 years ago.

The only way this ever works in anybody’s favor, is for much new construction to be put into the tax base, raising the total actual number of $1,000’s of improvements on the existing land base. Then per-unit taxation on the existing units tends to DROP.

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