Proposed City of Lubbock Budget Cuts The Tax Rate, But Taxpayers Will Still Pay More
The Lubbock City Council has been presented with a budget for the next fiscal year which will be discussed a lot this week during workshops at Citizens Tower. Those workshops on Wednesday and Thursday are scheduled for 2:00 pm and yes citizens can attend.
There are many different parts of the budget that people will be interested in. Of course that includes taxes. Overall, the proposed budget calls for a four cent decrease in the property tax rate, but Lubbock taxpayers would still pay more in taxes by $40.07 for the average single family home. During his presentation, City Manager Jarrett Atkinson said that the No New Revenue Rate would not work.
"When you talk about the no new revenue rate in theory, the mathematics of that would say if all in all done we collected $56 million from this collection of property we'll mathematically adjust the rate to get $56 million from the set of property in the new year, it does not actually work like that. We have run those calculations as well, and if we were to adopt the no new revenue rate you would actually have $1.3 million dollars less than a year ago.
The overall proposed budget for the next fiscal year will be over one billion dollars. According to Jarrett Atkinson, the budget will increase by 6.3%, over $60 million dollars to $1,026,141.00. The budget includes $12 million for street maintenance, dealing with inflation costs, and pay raises for City employees.
You can watch the full presentation to the council below. The portion dealing with the No New Revenue Rate begins around the 44 minute mark.
Citizen's can attend the budget workshops and have their say this week at Citizens Tower. Lubbock City Councilwoman Dr. Jennifer Wilson will join Chad Hasty and Matt Martin Thursday at 9:05am on KFYO to discuss the budget.