Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins Wants to Lower Your Property Tax Rate
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Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins
Dallas County’s top elected official has heard your sobs as you opened your recent property tax appraisal notices and he wants to do something about the real financial pinch felt by many of the 525,000 county property owners who saw shocking increases this year.
“What I’m proposing is that we capture the money that was budgeted for, but not this windfall,” Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, a Democrat, told WFAA.
If you agree with him, he’s started an online petition for you to sign so he can show his fellow county officials just how much Dallas County residents support this idea. I’m pretty sure just about all CandysDirt.com readers are going to put their John Hancock down, if the response we’ve received to stories about appraisals is any indication.
Basically, Jenkins wants to meet the demands of the current Dallas County budget by lowering the rates at which the county’s taxing jurisdictions collect on property appraisals. This might be tough for some taxing jurisdictions, such as Dallas Independent School District, but as Jenkins notes, anything worth doing is going to be hard.
So what do you think of Jenkins’ plan?
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Instead of lowering the rate, the outcome of windfall should be determined at the district/neighborhood/zip code type level. If a district with windfall income needs more for the roads, schools, etc they should be able to make that choice. If the district feels their roads/schools/infrastructure is fine, then it should be returned.
However, making windfall decisions at a very local level will take some of the ‘bite’ out of higher valuations, and allow residents to make the most optimal decisions about what to do with it.
I personally would prefer an action to expunge County Commissioner John Wiley Price, whose aggregate cost
to the county has probably been in the nine figures.
Investigative Journalist par excellence Laura Miller did a superbly documented expose of Mr. Price’s egregious
abuses of power and authority in D Magazine which is great reading, particularly the gem about the Courthouse
cultural item of how skinny white reporters who cause inconvenience are dealt with. ( hint: it saves one having to wait for an elevator.)
http://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/1991/march/the-hustler-john-wiley-price?single=1
To show how efficient government is, it has been only a quarter of a century for the Public Integrity Unit of the US Justice Department to indict Commissioner Price on virtually the same points that were in Laura’s
March 1991 D Magazine piece.
The collective transgressions and shortcomings of the Dallas County Government has been the root cause
for Dallas being ejected from the short list by many, many headquarters relocation task forces seeking a new home for their companies.
Yes, I do think that some reduction in our taxes might be in order. I would much rather see a cleaning up of our dysfunctional governance.