What's up with our Taxes?

Note: I posted this data on my campaign Facebook page in April

One of the simplest campaign statements is “Taxes are too high” or "We need to cut taxes." ; usually this is followed by a list of expensive programs they want to implement that would be paid for by the taxes they promised to cut.  That is the message of a lazy candidate. I’m not going to lie to you and claim I will cut your taxes; because while paying taxes is not fun, Taylor’s taxes aren’t that high relative to the surrounding communities.

First you have to understand all the line items in your tax bill, we have city taxes, school taxes, county taxes, county school taxes, county parks, county jail, WCCD, zoo, DIA, etc. It's a ridiculous number of items we pay for with our taxes.

Second, the tax rates vary a lot more than you may think.  A home owner that lives in the home pays a much lower (homestead) tax rate than a landlord that rents; a long term resident will pay lower taxes than a new home owner because of limits on how much taxes can go up a year.  I bought my parents house in 2005, they were the original owners in 1958.  The houses around mine are selling for $170K, my assessed value is $81K and my taxable value is $40K.  If I sell my house, the new owners will pay a lot more in taxes than I do.

Third, tax bills have two components, property value and tax rate. Ecorse has one of the highest tax rates in the state, almost twice Taylor’s, but because of the low property values, their tax bills are actually lower than Taylors.

If we look at just tax rates compared with the surrounding cites, Taylor is below the median value for tax rates.  The reference for this is below; some cities have multiple school districts; so they have different tax rates depending on what district covers the area (Inkster has areas in Taylor, Dearborn Heights, Wayne-Westland and Romulus Schools).  In those with multiple tax rates I averaged them to make things simpler and I used the Homestead tax rate.

Milage Rates

Factoring in property values is a little harder; as I said you have sale price, assessed value and taxable value.  Since I am just comparing the data, I’m going to use average sale price from Zillow, primarily because it is the easiest source of data.  If we factor in the tax rate and average sale price we can estimate a tax bill; with the Zillow number that isn’t necessarily a real number, but we can ratio it to Taylor tax bill to see where Taylor’s taxes are relative to the surrounding communities.

Relative Tax Rates 

The big issues with taxes is what do we get from them. Taylor now has a fully staffed police department, excellent parks and recreation options. Our schools need a lot of work, but that is a different government entity.  I understand that taxes suck, especially for those on fixed incomes, but Taylor doesn't have the highest tax rates in the area and we get a lot for what we pay. TLDR: Taxes are high, but not compared to the surrounding communities. https://www.michigan.gov/.../2023-Total-Rates-Report...

https://www.ownwell.com/trends/michigan/wayne-county