Albemarle County’s BoS decided to advertise the new mil rate of .71 cents per $100 of assessed property value. Two years ago it was .74, last year it was .68 and now they want to raise it again. We’re all doing with less money, and government should do the same. If “earning” more money was as easy as voting raises for ourselves, we would all do that, wouldn’t we?
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We hear so many demands from citizens wanting better/more roads, better schools, better parks, more affordable housing and so on, it seems fairly logical for the Board to raise taxes.
Also, the Board has approved thousands of new residential units and a lot of new commercial development. All of this growth costs money. For the the Board to green light new houses and then turn around and tell those citizens they’ll have to do without infrastructure and services seems disingenuous, to say the least.
J, I don’t mean to argue with you, but you have simplified the growth costs a bit too easily. Commercial growth pays for itself in spades. Read my recent post on http://www.caarblog.com to see what the real problem is going to be with raising our taxes.
Albemarle Headed for Deep Trouble
dave
i disagree with your post. you basically say that Albemarle is anti-business and has not approved enough commercial development, and that’s why the BOS is considering increasing the tax rate. talk about simplistic and factually wrong. numerous projects and thousands of square feet of commercial space has been approved by the BOS.
also, albemarle place has not moved forward because of a sewer capacity issue….
i doubt most folks want albemarle to turn into a sea of strip malls, as you seem to suggest it should. furthermore, compared to other places throughout the east coast, taxes are relatively low. i’m shocked that caar would want to ruin such a uniquely beautiful community (which it uses as a sales tool) with more big box boxes and concrete slabs as far as the eye can see. i doubt my realtor would support your perspective.
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Sam,
I am not looking for a fight on this. If you do not think Albemarle is anti-business, you must not talk to many business owners. In fact, the County has a national reputation for NOT being friendly to business. Until last year, they were the only County in the region NOT in TJPED and by the ammount of opposition we heard, you would have thought we wanted to join the KKK.
I’m fine with the citizens and government officials being anti-business, but the point I made on the CAAR Blog is that our retail tax base is going down and will continue to go down.
As to the recently approved developments, how many of those are actually going to be built? If we can not convince national retailers to locate here, the developer will not build a big empty box and hope someone will come along. The only large retailer to be willing to go through our process in the last 10 years is Target and MANY others have wanted to come but were unwilling to jump through the County’s hoops.
That’s reality. We can debate if it is good or bad, but that’s the facts. Like it or not, big retail is an important part of a well-balanced tax base. Albemarle’s is not well balanced and getting worse.