Real Estate in Victoria is high for what you get...I've looked at housing there & can't get anywhere near what I have here, there, at the same price range. When you rent, you still pay property taxes, it is added into the rent. If your property value goes up, you are paying more in taxes even though the rate may have gone down a teensy bit. That is a shell game...they lower the rate a tiny bit but rase the property value to make up the difference. Raising the taxable value doesn't help you make more on a sell....it does help people lose their homes due to not being able to afford the property tax. A house is only worth how much someone else is willing to pay for it, nothing more.

holein1,

Like most of what I have seen you post, you try to take what has been said, take it out of context and turn it around. I am not going to play that game with you so you can play it with yourself.

If your opinion is that everything is great, fine and wonderful when the debt being heaped on the taxpayers of Victoria is growing at a rate that exceeds population growth you are entitled to that opinion. Again just some facts, which I sure won't get in the way of your opinion:

Including cities with population of 50K to 100K:

2005-Victoria had 3rd higest tax rate and 9th highest debt per population

2010-Victoria had 9th highst tax rate and 9th highest debt per population

From 2005 to 2010 debt per population has grown 37% while population has grown 3%

If you think growing the debt at more then 10 times the rate of the population growth is good business then nothing I can say will change your mind. Be prepared for substantial increases in the city tax rate in the next several years leading up to 2018 because the debt has to be serviced and only two things increase the cash available to accomplish this; increase in tax base and increase in tax rate. One is on the way down so the other has to go up.

vox i don't think that anyone would actually sell their house for the amount on the tax rolls. it has been my experience that those figures are well below the market value, especially if they have lived in the house for any extended amount of time.

jeff, i'm not suggesting that you sell your home, although it's not a bad idea considering how much you hate paying taxes in our fair city. you could move to the country, perhaps in a neighboring county and save plenty.

i don't like paying taxes, never met anyone that does, unless they were being sarcastic. the thing is, we need to in some instances. how much has your actual tax bill risen since the valuation has risen $49,000?

lack's failure has nothing to do with taxation and everything to do with poor management and risky business practices. in fact, i would say that almost all of the rest of the businesses leaving or closing has nothing to do with taxes. we are not spending our money in those places. we have bought into the idea that there is nothing to offer in Victoria, so we choose to leave town and shop elsewhere. that is why they are not able to stay open.

one of the ways you can save on your tax bill...don't own. i assume you own the building you currently occupy on navarro. personally, i would have advised against it, especially considering your dislike of property taxes.

holein1, how often do people actually sell their house for what it is valued at?

Appraised value is not the same as market value, especially in today's economy. If you think appraised value in any way indicates how much you can sell your house for, then I'm afraid you have a skewed sense of reality.

holein1,

Your question is not off topic it is at the core of what I am saying.

I don't want to sell my house I want to live in it and not be taxed out of it. I would think that Lack's (valuation example I realize they are gone now), and many, many businesses that own property in Victoria don't want to sell out they want stay in business but rising costs, including ad valorem taxes, hinder our ability to do so.

not to get too off topic, but Jeff would rather sell your house for 2001 prices or 2010 prices? I have posed that question a few times to those that argue the valuation issue. No one has ever bothered to answer.

lampost,

I suggest you look it up at the City of Victoria but off the top of my head there has been maybe .05 or .06 cent reduction.

I know where you are going with this but your leading questions are of no significant value. Tax rate in and too itself is of no use when making comparisons. You have to include both the rate and the tax base valuations. I know you are coming from the camp that states the TAX RATE has been lowered slightly, which it has. The tax base valuations have grown considerably over the same 10 year period.

As an example the appraisal on my home in Bell Tower has increased $49,000 (45%) from 2001 to 2010 with only $5,000 in improvements. The Lack's store on Navarro (freestanding)increased $635,700 (47%) in the same period with no improvements.

You can throw up the "we cut the tax rate" all day long but the complete truth is the level of taxes paid by the vast majority of individual and business tax payers has increased significantly during the period your 2 questions cover.

lampost,

I am not going to spend a great deal of time explaining this as I don't think your opinion is going to change.

The short answer is 07/08 budget year debt service for City of Victoria was $$6.4MM. Projected debt service in 17/18 budget is $17.4M, an almost 3 fold increase in 10 years. These numbers do not include any new debt that would have to be incurred to build additional infrastructure. (Source is City of Victoria website/Finance Dept/Budgets)

We are seeing businesses (tax base) leaving Victoria, Lacks, Hallmark, Blockbuster, Adgraphics, (in just the last 3 months, Source Victoria Advocate) with very limited new businesses replacing them. (Source is my observations)

If you build infrastructure based on $2BB in economic impact and the actual impact is only $1BB you have half as much tax revenue to service the debt created. If the debt is incurred and the revenue is less then projected the existing tax payers will shoulder this IN ADDITION TO the 3 fold increase seen by 2018.

Just one more piece of info, the population in Victoria has grown at a rate of about 3% over the past 10 years. (City-data.com ) This is not 3% per year but 3% total. Population growing at 3% (historically over 10 years) debt service growing at 170% (projected over 10 years).

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Gabe,

We can always agree to disagree. Below is an explanation from a third party, not my words, theirs:

Mean and Sample Size
If the sample size is too small, the mean scores will be artificially inflated or deflated. Suppose only five students took a reading test. An average score of 94 percent would require most of those students to have scored near 94 percent. If 500 students took the same test, the mean could reflect a wider variety of scores.

Median and Sample Size
Similarly, the median scores will be unduly influenced by a small sample size. If only five students took a test, a median score of 83 percent would mean that two students scored higher than 83 percent and two students scored lower. If 500 students took the test, the median score would reflect the fact that 249 students scored higher than the median score.

Sample Size and Statistical Significance
Small sample sizes are problematic because the results of experiments involving them are not usually statistically significant. Statistical significance is a measurement of how likely it is that results occurred by random chance. With small sample sizes, it is generally extremely likely that results were due to random chance rather than to the experiment.

The bottom line in this type of statistical analysis is, the larger the sample the more refelective the mean (average) and median are of the sample.

I did a quick test of five groups using 1772 random numbers in each group. The results reflected as a percentage of the median being different then the average were:

2.1% 0.1% 0.7% -0.5% -1.4%

As you can see the largest descrepency was 2% and the smallest .1%. The greater the sampling size the more reflective the results are of the group sampled.

Conducting the same test with a sampling size of 5 the results reflected as a percentage of the median being different then the average were:

8.00% 16.15% -3.31% -8.38% 25.02%

I still hold to my original statement that projecting 1,772 jobs will be created at the level of $85K annually per job is problematic.

For people who really don't care about the math, why is this important. The local taxpayers will be burdened with the costs involved to buiild and support the infrustucture around this campus. If the economic impact is 75% or 50% of what these projections are, the tax burden is going to be overbearing on the existing taxpayers.

Jeff,
Thanks again for the note. In the end, we will have to agree to disagree. The way I see it, the greater the number of employees and salaries, the more chances there are for these large pay discrepancies to exist -- and thus the more skewed averaged aggregates can become.
Gabe

Gabe,

I don't dispute your example when dealing with a limited sampling, five employees.

The numbers in the study include 1,772 potential jobs. With this large sampling average is going to be very close to the median unless you have a substantial number of jobs with extremely large salaries. My point is $85K as an average across a sampling of 1,700 salaries is significantly above what is being paid in Victoria including the salaries at UHV.

Projecting numbers that appear to be unrealistic causes me to question the accuracy of the study. This is why looking at a study produced 15 years ago and comparing their projections to actual results would be interesting.

Hey, Jeff. Good to hear from you. I'm copying and pasting below a comment I just wrote for a story you also commented on. I'm not arguing for or against your points, but I do question the process you use to base your argument (no hard feelings, I hope).

I do a lot of work to examine salaries. The majority of scholars and investigative reporters calculate "median" salary information instead of "average" salary data. Average salary information is often less useful than median salary information because it can be misleading. To calculate an average, you add up the salaries and divide by the number of employees. However, a few high wage earners -- or low wage earners -- can skew findings.

For example: If a company has five employees, and one employee earns $20,000 per year, two earn $40,000, one employee earns $50,000 and another employee earns $350,000 (for a total company payroll of $500,000), the average salary for the company is $100,000. Clearly, $100,000 is not reflective of how much money the "average" employee of this company earns. That figure is skewed higher because of the high wage earner.

That's why it's often best to use median data to illustrate benefits such as salaries. To calculate a median salary, you simply point to the salary in the middle of the heap (if the heap is ordered from smallest to largest, or vice versa).

In the example of my made-up company, $40,000 would be the median salary. This number, when compared to the other salaries, is more reflective of what the typical employee earns.

Gabe,

Based on just one measure of the economic impact, Salaries paid to direct and indirect workers, their conclusions indicate that ON AVERAGE each of the 1,772 jobs created will earn $85,776 per year ($1,519,555,860/10/1772). This average would include indirect jobs in retail, food service at the university, construction, administration, professors, etc. In reality how many $85K per year jobs do you think will actually be created?

It would be interesting to find an economic impact analysis conducted by this firm 15 years ago and compare their projections to actual results. This one indicator appears to be greatly over projected as I find it very hard to believe 1,700 jobs earning $85K per year can be created.