by Dick Hall-Sizemore

Maybe Henrico County officials read my recent lament in Bacon’s Rebellion concerning the significant increase in my house’s assessed value. In any event, the county manager’s office announced this week that it was proposing to the Board of Supervisors a reduction of 2 cents in the real estate tax rate.

Now many people will be quick to point out that I and other Henrico residents will still have to pay more in taxes this year than we did last year; therefore, it is not a tax cut. And they would be right up to a point. I tend to take a different perspective: I will not have to pay as much tax as I would have if the county had kept the tax rate the same. In that sense, my taxes will have been reduced from what they would have been otherwise.

I don’t know how much the Board would need to reduce the rate in order to bring in the same amount of revenue as last year. The county is required to identify this “equalized rate” when it schedules a public hearing on the budget later this spring.

To be fair, in the announcement on its website, the county did not claim it was providing a tax cut. It used the term “tax relief” and was careful in the body of the announcement to specify that it was cutting the tax rate. Of course, many residents may associate “tax relief” with a “tax cut” and many may assume that a reduction in the tax rate will result in their paying less tax.

Does local government have an obligation to spell this distinction out to residents? The requirement to publish the “equalized rate” satisfies, to some extent, any such obligation. I suspect that most of the people who are unaware of the difference in a cut in the amount of taxes owed and a reduction in the tax rate would not pay much attention to the published equalized rate. Comments made to the press such as the one made to the Richmond Times-Dispatch certainly will not help avoid misunderstanding. According to the paper, “Added to the programs for targeted groups, Henrico estimated the upcoming budget would return $18.3 million to taxpayers.” It won’t be “returning” that money, it will just be getting that much less than they could have out of us. There is a difference.

The county also announced a five-cent reduction in its personal property tax rate. That won’t help me. Both my vehicles are old enough that I don’t owe any tax on them.