Will Someone Please Make a Pledge to Lower Property Taxes?

Posted by Mary Mancini on August 30, 2007 under Uncategorized |

Gail Kerr writing in today’s Tennessean, reminds us that despite the best efforts of either mayoral candidate, your property taxes will increase willy nilly all on their own.

North’s [Jo Ann North, Nashville's assessor of property] staff looks at every one of the properties in Davidson County every four years. They compare your house and the land it sits on to recent sales of similar properties in your neighborhood. Then they adjust your home’s fair market value. Property taxes are paid on that number.

In other words, even if you don’t make improvements to your home but the houses in your neighborhood improve - think East Nashville, 12 South, Salemtown - then your property taxes will increase, regardless of any mayoral pledges to the contrary. And how will those for whom even a moderate property tax increase is unmanageable handle the inevitable jump that will follow in neighborhoods where developers are already replacing modest homes with those selling for four, five and six hundred thousand dollars? As Kerr points out, the next reappraisal in 2009 is halfway through the next mayor’s term and whoever wins “won’t be able to do a thing to help people who own homes in hot real estate markets.”

Or maybe they can. At the very least, they can make a pledge.

In July of this year, Mayor Purcell signed a resolution the council had passed implementing the Property Tax Freeze Program. Currently, the program will freeze property taxes for Metro residents who are 65 or older and who meet the income requirements set by the state - $34,260 for Davidson County.

During the signing ceremony, Mayor Purcell said the program “is far better than any tax relief program previously available to seniors, but we must keep pushing at the state level to raise the income cap so that many more seniors can get the relief they need and deserve.”

Perhaps Clement and Dean can pledge to keep pushing for a raise in the income cap. And while they’re at it, they can pledge to lower or remove the age requirement. Modest income homeowners of all ages should be able to keep their houses in Nashville’s rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. There’s no better way to maintain the balance and income diversity in Davidson County’s more urban districts.

And if this proposal contains too much nuance, the two candidates can simply make a pledge to lower property taxes. It would, after all, have as much meaning as Clement’s pledge to, well, you know…