ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, February 7, 1997 TAG: 9702070067
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN CASEY STAFF WRITER
Here's how retired lawyer William Ammen sees it: His real estate taxes climbed $71 last year. If the tax rate remains the same this year, his taxes will jump another $50 annually, thanks to a recent reassessment.
Meanwhile, inflation is slowly eroding Ammen's fixed income. When talk of a tax rate cut was floated at a recent Roanoke City Council meeting, he was cheered.
Ammen is hardly alone. Some City Council members elected last May say one of the most frequent gripes they heard while campaigning door to door was the steady climb in city real estate taxes.
Roanoke's real estate rate has remained at $1.23 per $100 of assessed value since 1994, the last time a rate cut went into effect. But for nearly every landowner, assessments have increased each year since then.
If the current rate is not cut, assessment increases will send an estimated $1.2 million more to City Hall in the next fiscal year.
Assessments in Roanoke this year increased a bit more than 3 percent on average, so the owner of a $75,000 home would pay $27.68 more in real estate taxes in the next fiscal year, which begins July1.
"The people out here are upset," says Ammen, who has lived in a far corner of Southwest Roanoke near Columbia Lewis-Gale Hospital for more than 40 years. "People all over the city are talking about it, but nobody wants to do anything."
Ammen has rounded up about 25 friends and neighbors, most of them retirees like him. The way things look now, their group may wind up squaring off against teachers and parents of schoolchildren who view tax cuts as a threat to education and teachers' salaries.
The picture is likely to remain cloudy at least until after a March 8 council finance workshop, when Finance Director Jim Grisso will deliver revenue estimates for next year.
Three councilmen - Jim Trout, Carroll Swain and Mayor David Bowers - are on the record strongly favoring some kind of tax cut, perhaps as much as 4 cents. Councilman William White also favors one, but only if it won't affect the city's financial health.
Vice Mayor Linda Wyatt is against cutting taxes, and Councilman Jack Parrott seems inclined that way. Councilman Nelson Harris hasn't spoken on the issue.
Each penny cut from the rate equates to $350,000 the city won't get, so a 4-cent cut would leave the city with essentially the same real estate revenue as the current year.
Taxes are serious business to Jeanne Pedigo, who has lived in the same house on Eton Road in Southwest Roanoke for 42 years. Like her neighbor Ammen, she and her husband, William, are retired.
"In the last nine years, our real estate taxes have increased by 30 percent," Pedigo says. "We have no way of increasing our income. What we considered a very ample retirement income 15 years ago seems not so ample now. Roanoke's homeowners are older."
Ammen says he's in favor of good schools, but the city should find money for them elsewhere in the budget. He cited capital projects such as the $4.1million invested in the renovation of Jefferson High School.
"I think that should be done by the private sector," he says.
Trout, who is angling for a 10-cent cut in the real estate tax rate over the next five years, says it's time to give taxpayers a break.
"Over the years, our homeowners have criticized annual tax increases very little," Trout says. "As a result, we have spent millions of dollars providing efficient services and building projects. ... What made Roanoke an All-America city is that people absorbed annual tax increases. I think we've got to give attention to these citizens."
Wyatt, a city schoolteacher, says nobody asked her to cut taxes in the recent campaign. Since the tax cut talk began Jan.27, she's had one letter in favor of them, and half a dozen phone calls "where people are saying, 'Have you all lost your minds?'''
"I would hope that people would look at it logically and say, 'OK, it may save me $5, but this is going to put off curb and guttering in my neighborhood for 10 years,''' she says. "Individually, the tax cuts don't amount to that much. Collectively, they can do a real number on services a city can deliver. That's the big picture."
In 1977, the city real estate rate was $1.64 per $100 of assessed valuation. Council has cut it by 41 cents - or 33 percent - since then, but those cuts have been offset by rising assessments. The city's tax base has tripled in the same period, from roughly $1billion in 1977 to about $3 billion today.
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