Travis County Commssioners Court
June 29, 2004
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Item 8
Number 8, consider and take appropriate action on request to adopt a ad valorem tax exemption for taxpayers of the Travis County hospital district pursuant to Texas tax code section 11.13 (n) 2004 and t-rbg health and safety code. In order to meet the deadline, we have to do this before the board.
>> you have to do it before the board? You don't actually do it before the board. The Commissioners court set the ad valorem tax epl sun shupls for the hospital district.
>> are we prepared for less in comparison of the hospital district exemptions and county exemptions and we figured this out to the court yesterday. And looks like most of them -- I guess about half of them get pretty -- give pretty much the same exemption to the district as they give to the county.
>> as a general rule, they pretty much if the county is given the exemption, it's been extended to the hospital district. That is not universally true, but if you'll see the sheet in front of you that is sort of the general rule of thumb.
>> and what is the effect of that on the hospital district, I guess? Do the ones that give the exemption, are they coming up short in revenue to deal with the health issues? Or is it -- it doesn't matter?
>> I think the important -- there's no magic bullet with the hospital district. All of them have funding issues, but so do individual cities and counties have funding issues on this. What this does is set out up front where the dispro forks nature burden is going to -- disproportionate burden is going to fall from day one related to the roles. Travis County, and I think quite proudly, does the 20% exemption which pults a little bit more of the burden on business which has more ways to absorb that than do you and I and everybody else that has a homestead. And if you have a decent enough homestead exemption, we already know from the exemption that we give at Travis County that homes up to a certain value, they are not paying any county taxes, so you really take that burden away from those that are absolutely at the lowest end of the home value scale. We have some folks right now that don't pay county taxes because of their -- their homes are like $90,000 or less. That with the 20% and the 65,000 on top of that, if you are over 65, and that's a good thing for those folks. If we don't do it, there's going to be an awful lot of folks at the lowest end who are homeowners that all of a sudden are going to have a bill that they never had before with the county. If you don't do it from day one, you will never get there. And I know I spent a great deal of time harping on the fact that the city of Austin does not have a homestead exemption. The other nice thing about a homestead exemption is that it kind of helps take the edge off of what's going in your appraisal district. And I think there are an awful lot of folks less than happy with the values that have been given their homes from the appraisal district. It is what it is, but the 20% kind of takes the edge off of it and said that may be the number, but you know for purposes of taxation, Travis County is going to knock something off of that, and that's the number we're going to tax at as opposed to a number that a lot of times a lot of people disagree but simply because of the market it can't contest because the market is what the market is. I know Margaret you asked this last week whether it was implied or not, there's certainly, I think if you ask people what their impression was whether it was -- whether they had the right to have that impression or not, who gave them that impression or not, I think people thought that the homestead exemption was going to be part of that and that at least for folks within the city of Austin, that was a selling point to get in on this because they would have a good chunk of the expenditures related to health care shift from their home that is not getting the benefit of a homestead exemption through the city of Austin and it would move over to a hospital district where there is an exemption, and then for folks at the county, there would be a consistency of it is the same in terms of the shiftover. But if you don't do kind of the setting out of homestead versus business taking up the slack now, you'll never get there. You'll never be able to change that.
>> move [inaudible] second additional $65,000 for over 65 for disabled.
>> second.
>> same as for Travis County. Discussion? All in favor say aye. Show Commissioners Davis, Sonleitner, tkautdry, yours trulyly voting again. Abstaining Commissioner Gomez. That takes care of that, jim?
Last Modified: Wednesday, June 30, 2004 9:28 AM