Wendell News Outlet

Informational News of interest for the citizens in and around Wendell, North Carolina. Postings on this site are the property of Glenn Harris and cannot be copied without express written permission. Archives are listed at the bottom of the home page.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Property Taxes

I noticed a recent Eastern Wake News article about Knightdale holding their property tax rate at .50 per $100 valuation.
That got me to thinking.
Most of us have been led to believe that Garner has the highest city tax rate at .575 per $100 valuation and that the tax rate for Wendell is only .54 per $100 valuation.
Technically speaking that may be correct when looking at the property tax rate chart at wakegov.com web site and/or listening to our city officials.
For those of you living in Wendell, look at your tax bill and you will notice that there is also a Fire District Tax added to your tax bill.
Wendell is the only city in Wake County that has a Fire District Tax Rate along with the City Tax Rate.
This fact has been confirmed by Ken McArtor, Wake County Revenue Department, Customer Response Center, 919-856-5400.

Therefore, the real tax rate for Wendell is .64 (also revealed in a recent N&O article) per $100 valuation and is 11% higher than Garner, 28% higher than Knightdale, 47% higher than Raleigh, 52% higher than Cary and 60% higher than Apex.

So I decided to do a few comparisons.
There is property on S. Selma Road in Wendell that currently has a tax value of $313,651.
In Wendell it will have a city tax bill of $2,007.37 which includes fire protection.
In Garner it would have a city tax bill of $1,803.49 which includes fire protection.
In Zebulon it would have a city tax bill of $1,725.08 which includes fire protection.
In Rolesville it would have a city tax bill of $1,615.30 which includes fire protection.
In Knightdale it would have a city tax bill of $1,568.25 which includes fire protection.
In Raleigh it would have a city tax bill of $1,364.38 which includes fire protection.
In Cary it would have a city tax bill of $1,317.33 which includes fire protection.
In Apex it would have a city tax bill of $1,254.60 which includes fire protection.

The county tax bill would be the same in each of the above examples.
As you can see, city tax bills vary considerably with Wendell having the highest tax bill by far.

So my the questions for our elected officials are:
What are we getting extra for this extra high tax?
Where is the "extra bang for our extra bucks"?
Why are tax bills highest in Wendell compared to the rest of Wake County?
If diversity (or lack of diversity) is a major part of our high tax rate, how do we create more diversity in Wendell's tax base?

Glenn Harris

posted by Administrator # 5:11 PM

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