15 January 2009

Property Taxes Due

If you are a property owner in Hamilton County, then you just recieved your annual invoice from Robert A. Goering. I'm posting this information for non-property owners, so they can see what we pay, and what it is spent on. For an in-city $100,000 house, the breakdown is something like below.
Item FundedDollarsPercent of Total Tax
Schools450.0016.8
City of Cincinnati2075.0077.8
Vocational School County Gen Fund 20.000.75
County Voted Bond Debt 1.25 0.05
Drake Hospital6.800.25
Indegent Hospital22.000.82
Mental Health17.440.65
Mental Retardation 29.40 1.10
Park District8.060.30
Crime Info Center1.100.04
Children Services19.750.74
Senior Services10.000.38
Zoo3.360.13
Museum Center1.620.06
Total Property Tax 2667.222.6% of home value

Call me a liberal Democrat, but the amounts seem reasonable to me. $450 for public schools. $2000 for streets, garbage collection, police and all the other things the City provides? Of course they also get income tax, and the county also gets a sales tax.

And certainly, many people live in houses, condos and apartments that are worth more than $100,000, and the tax is increased proportionally.

Is the County Voted Bond Debt the Stadium projects?

7 comments:

Mark Miller said...

Your getting confused. It's not Cincinnati that gets the $2075, it's Hamilton County. For a breakdown on where that $2075 goes, see Dusty's page here.

The City gets a pittance from the property tax, and rebates most of it anyway. Most of their funding comes from the earnings tax.

In Cincinnati, CPS is about 2/3 of our total property tax bill (2nd most expensive in Ohio) and if you add in the other school-related levies, about 3/4 of our property taxes go fund public education. That $450 "TaxSchools" is the billion dollar facilities levy we gave them a few years back to use for tearing down all the nice old buildings.

Oh, and at 2.6%, you have effectively turned over your property to the government after 38 (100/2.6) years.

CityKin said...

I knew this post would get you going Mark. But really, thanks for clarifying. Seems like almost all of the $2075 goes to CPS, which I did not realize at all. How many years is the $450 levy for?

5chw4r7z said...

I just bought a condo and about flipped over the property taxes, they haven't told us what they'll be yet, we have a 15 yr abatement, but I think in about 13 yrs we'll be renting again.

Quimbob said...

I thought it was kinda odd that we pay about twice as much for mentally retarded services than for mentally ill services.
Is that really how the need/expenses break down ?

PS ultimately, you don't really own your property anyway.

Mark Miller said...

Mike,
Seems like forever...
But really, it was a 10 year levy approved in a special election May 2003. So in about five more years that particular shackle will be lifted from us.

I've seen some of your older posts on school buildings. So how about an update; is our billion dollars being well spent on the new facilities?

While we're on the subject, this is the last year we'll be paying the Drake levy. Unless Pepper & Portune find a way to resurrect it on the third day. Having lost money from time immemorial, it was finally sold and is making money. The new operator said it doesn't need or want the levy. Details here.

Quim,
That's really the breakdown. Think of it this way:
Retardation levy covers long term care of those who can't fend for themselves; it's a permanent societal obligation.
Ill levy covers treatment; those folks eventually either get better, or get transferred to the first group.

Randy Simes said...

Seems reasonable to me.

Sincerely,

A non-property owner

CityKin said...

"So how about an update; is our billion dollars being well spent on the new facilities?"

Uh, no. They have built a lot of generic crap and torn down or sold many beautiful old buildings.

My hope is that test scores will continue to increase and it will be good for property values.