Travis County Commssioners Court
May 4, 2004
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Item 37
The final item is -- before executive session is number 37. And that is to consider and take appropriate action a legislative issues in Travis County during the special session of the 78th legislature.
>> judge, I talked to bob earlier, they are very busy over at the capitol. They said amendments are flying every which way so I had invited him to be here, but they thought their time would be better used over there. The only thing that is -- we had a conference call yesterday with p.u.c. The only thing that is still there is they've reduced the 10% to 5% on the appraisals. Now, that is still standing. And so -- but everything else seems to be on the line. And so --
>> so they are still looking at capping county [indiscernible] at inflation factor plus population growth?
>> i've been watching it this morning. It's very confusing. There's a whole lot of agreement. The governor is still weighing in very heavily. The bill that they are looking at right now does not have a revenue cap. It does have an appraisal cap ain't doesn't have the inflation plus the c.p.i. Cap. But there are discussions that those will raise their ugly heads yet again. And I think that we've done a good job in our packet that we put together talking about what would happen with that inflation plus the population growth cap. And the other argument, and I’m working on documentation -- let me hand out what i've got. The other one they looked at was what if they brought the rollback rate down from 8 to 5. Of course for the public watching, there's already a cap on budgets. Many caps for county governments. But one is the rollback rate. And the way taxes are set out is that there is one rate and that's the debt service rate, and that's the amount of money that we need to pay the debt service, the interest and principal on the bonds that we have. And it is generally agreed by everyone that of course you have to pay that. So that's the debt service rate and that's dictated by paying back debt. The other rate is the maintenance and operation rate, and that's the one that's really being discussed. And that's the one that there's a rollback rate. You determine your effective tax rate and that's the amount of tax -- the amount of the rate that you have to set to raise the same amount of money as you did the previous year with the same amount of property. And that's the effective tax rate. And the rollback rate is 8% above that. And so what I did was on this chart that you are looking at here -- let me say one more thing first. The presumption between people that propose lowering caps, and the governor's plan was one of those, is that local governments have just continued an upward spiral in raising taxes. And if in fact they would cut the property tax for schools, that local governments like counties, that's the one we're most concerned with, would take up that difference. So it's useful to see is that the pattern that we've had in the past and is that a fair statement, and we can't talk to other governments, but we can talk about our own. And this chart here, if you look at right there, it shows every year for the past 12 years what we've come above the effective tax rate. And as you look at that, there were four years that we increased above 5%. And the reason that's relevant is if the rollback rate came down to five, you would have to look at those years and say what we have done at 5%. So what I’m working on is getting those four critical years, and I’m almost done with that, but I don't want to hand it out today until I look at it again, what kinds of increases did we have. Just in the work that i've done so far, primarily what we were looking at is major expansions in the adult and juvenile corrections systems. Those were big increases. In those years. Not just that. E.m.s. Was a big increase. But in those four years. And so the argument of would we be hurt by a 5% rollback, the answer is absolutely yes, we would. And there would be mandated services that would be cut. What I did here is I graft the increases above effective rate. And I think the graph is useful because what it showed here is not a continuous uptrend where every year we just keep increasing more and more. What it really shows is there are years when we really need to do have a fairly large increase. And there were years that we did not. And in years that we did increase, you can see that the Commissioners court, whoever was there in the time, really made an effort in the next year to not make much of an increase. So I think that this shows really a responsibleness of the Commissioners court of trying to just increase taxes when we really had programs or issues that required that. So I think that the data here does not support the fact that, you know, any decrease in property taxes we would see a green light to proceed quickly and fill up that because we have certainly not done that the in the past. So I’m working on that documentation because I think that we need to be prepared to provide our case. Either the revenue cap proposed by the governor's plan or the one that was proposed by that committee but didn't make to it the house in case it's reintroduced. Because we really don't know what's going to happen. But I think the key in all of this is that people need to understand is that there would in fact -- we would not be able to render services at the legal mandated level under these caps and there would have to be a lack of increase in some very significant programs here. And it's not really money given to the government, it's money providing services of the nature that we're required to provide, again given most of those services we do not control demand and we are 68% dependent on property taxes government-wide and about 78% in the general fund. So that's really the bind, and counties are uniquely in that position. So I think we need to have evidence to talk to anyone we can with those points in mind. And it's hard to tell what the house is doing right now. There's a lot of controversy going on. No surprise there.
>> the latest on the wires is that apparently some county officials which included judge kellerher had about a two-hour meeting with governor perry this morning laying out the county case. That apparently happened this morning. Also on the house side, it's even getting stranger because speaker craddick is basically saying the video slot idea is d.o.a. And that's a huge part of the funding strategy necessary, and governor perry is issuing statements saying don't count on the increase in the business tax. So between those two things, it's gutting what were going to be the dollar amounts so it's anybody's guess what's going on right now. The one thing I wanted to make sure that we also had on our radar screen, judge bembry sent a note because of all the attention on the appraisals. If once again the bill we vehemently opposed about putting appeals of tax appraisals into small claims courts, into j.p. Courts has reared its head as well and that's something we need to keep an eye on and we opposed this during the last legislative session, but I don't know if a motion is appropriate for this today, judge or if you want to wait until next week when bob gets here, but this is one we need to keep an eye on because it was a bad bill last time and it's still a bad bill and especially if these things come with more attention being put on what home appraisals are, the last place you want those to be heard are in j.p. Court which are not equipped in personnel and caseload to take on that task.
>> [indiscernible] of reasons. So it won't look like we're just reacting negatively to -- what I recall is that j.p.s right now are pretty much overworked in terms of caseload.
>> judge, if you want, I can have anne pull the letter we did last time around related to the bill. It's under a different number. We'll have her pull that together for next week.
>> pull that together and augment it as necessary. I would check with the j.p.s and get workload stats. The last time I was left with the impression the legislators didn't fully understand how that bill if passed would impact various j.p. Courts. I don't see them doing this efficiently and carrying out the other functions they have. But I think we need some specific stats to do. That I do recall I think we ault to supplement that and present it.
>> and I appreciate the judge bringing this to our attention. It's now called house bill 41 and it's representative maury this time around. But we're happy to have ann work with barbara and --
>> that's a good example of how kind of old bills that seem to be unrelated to what they are doing right now really can work their way into this consideration.
>> the other thing was the a.e.p. Funding. They were working to restore the half a million, but they may have done it. They may have had -- looking at that this afternoon.
>> the amendment to the bill that went in was 400 pages. Very, very detailed. Extremely detailed. They've amended that again at this -- today, a few seconds ago. The whole bill is so complex and I agree with the judge we -- you know, what i've been trying to do on our behalf where it regards numbers is get the facts out there so that our legislative delegation understands the facts. And then they can make an informed decision.
>> well, we just need to oppose the -- move our evaluation protest into the j.p. Court.
>> it's house bill 41 and we're happy to have ann to update our letter that is basically going to be a --
>> I think we ought to approve our protest because no telling what may happen between now and next Tuesday.
>> and they are going to be -- I talked to jim allison this morning. He assumed committees or someone will be meeting every day including the weekend.
>> I would put that in the form of a motion.
>> seconded by Commissioner Gomez. Any more discussion? All in favor? That passes by unanimous vote. And just have them put our delegation on notice and let them know we hope to have something by next Tuesday to put in their hands, but in the meantime we can expect nothing but catastrophic consequences because of that and we think it will make a bad situation even worse in terms of work loads in the j.p.s.
>> if people are frustrated at their appraisal, they certainly want it promptly taken care of. If they are in fact putting in a system where that can't happen, it only exacerbates people's aggravation and I don't think really anyone intends to do that. But yeah, I do think we need to tell them that is not a swift resolution of the problem.
>> we voted on that, right? Okay.
Last Modified: Wednesday, May 5, 2004 7:38 AM