What It Costs Harris County Residents to Save $50 Per Taxpayer

How does your 2022 property tax bill differ from the previous year’s bill? Email Andrew Schneider at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter. @schneider_hpm.

Last fall, Republican Commissioners Jack Cagle and Tom Ramsey boycotted the Harris County Commissioners’ Court for weeks to force the Democratic majority to pass a smaller budget and lower tax rates. Both then and later, Ramsey and Cagle claimed that their actions collectively saved the county’s taxpayers over a quarter of a billion dollars. How much of these savings per taxpayer and whether these savings are worth the effect on county services is another matter.

The Democratic majority in the Court of Commissioners originally proposed a budget for fiscal year 2023 of $2.24 billion. A boycott of Republican commissioners forced Democrats to pass a $2.13 billion budget cut — a $110 million difference.

State Senator Paul Betancourt has made a career out of trying to lower property taxes. Just before Christmas, he gathered several local leaders at his West Houston office to announce that the average Harris County property tax bill in 2022 will be lower than the year before.

“While this is a net difference of $50, this is the first time we have seen this since I was elected IRS in 1998,” Betancourt said, citing data provided by the Texas Association of Taxpayers and Researchers. “This is really amazingly good news for taxpayers, because taxpayers are used to getting bills that just go up and fly to the moon. But this year it’s not like that.”

The reasons were tax credit bills passed by the Texas Legislature a few years ago, a couple of tax exemptions passed by Texas voters last spring, and an almost two-month court boycott by Harris County Commissioners Cagle and Ramsey. This latest move forced the Democratic majority in the court to adopt the same rate of return for the 2022 tax year as the previous year – hence the term “no new rate of return.”

“We’ve all been affected by what happened with COVID,” Commissioner Tom Ramsey told a news conference. “We were all affected by what happened to record inflation over the past year. To get some tax breaks, any kind of breaks is a historic event and I’m proud to be a part of it.”

Ramsey said calling the lower tax rate no new income rate was actually wrong because the county actually gets more tax revenue from new construction.

“It’s actually another $70 million due to new construction and other factors,” Ramsey said. “So what actually happened in Harris County was an increase in income that has nothing to do with the tax rate.”

The Harris County Office of Management and Budget said the actual amount is closer to $66 million.

Despite this, Commissioner Cagle, who lost the re-election, said the budget was more than enough to pay for the district government’s core responsibilities of public safety and infrastructure.

“I think we made the mistake of starting to spend things that weren’t the province of the county, and when we did, we didn’t do it as well,” Cagle said, naming Democratic priorities such as early childhood education in as an example. “When taxpayers are struggling to make ends meet, this is not the time for us to raise taxes for them. And we actually got more money.”

Cagle said he wanted to save taxpayers money during an inflationary time. But the Democrats in the Court of Commissioners argued that they also wanted to lower tax rates. The Harris County Office of Management and Budget estimated that the difference between the county’s proposed tax rates and the lack of new income rates it was forced to accept was just over $100 a year for a $300,000 home.

“We never discussed whether we were going to cut taxes,” said Daniel Ramos, executive director of the budget office. “The discussion was about how much we were going to cut taxes.”

Ramos agreed with Cagle that rising costs are a problem for taxpayers, but it’s also a problem the county is facing.

“Departments are dealing with commodity cost inflation as well as county healthcare inflation,” Ramos said. “And so for most departments, to provide the same level of service, it costs about 10% more than in the previous fiscal year.”

Ramos said the county’s health care spending alone is eating into more than a third of the extra revenue from higher property valuations. “Departments, since things cost about 10% more than the previous year, this is a functional reduction,” he said. “Where they could afford 10 positions, they can only afford nine because healthcare costs have gone up by about $800 per worker.”

In addition to inflation, the county’s debt servicing has also increased. And that’s not even taking into account a number of unfunded mandates passed by the Legislative Assembly in 2021.

“SB 1 has significantly increased the cost of holding elections for us,” he said. “SB 6 has greatly increased the number of personnel needed to document people who go through our justice system. SB 23 set a hard limit on how much we should spend on public safety year after year.”

As a result, the county is facing very real cuts across the board, including in essential services.

“It’s easy to say that we should do our best and only fund public safety, but for example, Universal Services supports the fleet and IT for the Sheriff’s Department,” Ramos said. “Many of these services, (which) support public safety, have been vastly underfunded and will continue to reduce the quality of services provided in the rest of the county.”

This does not mean that the district is laying off employees en masse. Most departments were able to reduce their vacant posts. But in many cases, departments have used these vacant positions to offset other expenses.

As an example, Ramos pointed to the Institute of Criminalistics, which runs the county morgue. “All medical examiners are certified doctors with special skills,” he said. “They used savings from vacancies to fund contractors. So we’re doing fewer autopsies in the county than before there was no new revenue.”

The county has less than four months left in the current fiscal year. On Jan. 31, Ramos is due to provide the Court of Commissioners with an update on county revenue and spending.

“We are still at the beginning of the journey,” Ramos said. “Right now, the DA’s salary is equal to their total appropriation… The Sheriff’s Department is delaying hiring additional deputies. We’re seeing this in many, many different departments.”