Reply to MoCo tax revenues sharply down

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Unless I am somehow misreading the charts…tax revenue is up but not as much as projected.

Correct?[/quote]

Right. Mostly property tax revenue projections, which had been based on inflated values and assessments.[/quote]

Inflated assessments would not have caused a projection problem if Andrew Friedson hadn’t led a shift from constant yield to constant rate. He presents himself as a budget hawk but has voted for nearly all the spending (including the pay raises that are the biggest threat to fiscal sustainability). The change in how property taxes are set allowed the county to binge spend while property values went up and allowed the county to rely on shaky projections of property values in the out years. [/quote]

Constant rate is far more common across the US. I doubt many people even realized we weren't operating off constant rate.[/quote]

That doesn’t make it good policy. One reason we had constant yield was to reign in the county government’s tendency to overspend in good times. Under the old system, increasing revenue apace with growth in the assessable base would have required a unanimous vote. Under Friedson’s system, those increases happed automatically. His reputation as a fiscal hawk and budget genius is entirely unearned. He was smart enough to protect his biggest donors by giving them full tax abatements, so you have to give him credit for that at least. [/quote]

Constant yield doesn't address inflation, so you end up needing to adjust every year anyway.

And requiring unanimous votes for anything was and is a terrible idea.[/quote]

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