How well would most of us be doing if, say, we were lucky enough to have an annual salary of $229,000? Pretty dang well, right? And the fact is, there are lots of people, even in our proverbially poor county, who are doing that well or better.
But for most of us? Nah, we wish!
I cite that particular figure — almost a quarter of a million dollars, note — because it’s the hypothetical amount of revenue brought into the county coffers by the final digit of the state-certified tax rate for Shelby County. One five-hundredth of a nickel. Let’s put that in numerals. $0.001.
The Shelby County Commission is about to adopt a tax rate, and the number the county commission has been conjuring with, to equate to the demands of its budget projected so far, is $3.451. The tax rate is calibrated as a portion of the assessed value of real property. Take a house whose appraised value is $100,000. The assessed value is reckoned at 25 percent of that — so that, for the hypothetical $100,000 home in question, a tax rate of, say, $3.45 would be multiplied by $25,000 (which is one-fourth of $100,000, right?), and that sum would be divided by 100. The property in question would command a tax payment of $862.50.
Now, that’s for a tax rate of $3.45. If the tax rate were $3.46, the tax owed would be $865. Not much difference there for the individual taxpayer owning such a modest place.
But the difference for the county overall between a rate of $3.45 and one of $3.46 is — make sure you’re sitting down — no less than $2,292,999 — two and a quarter million. A nice piece of change, that is, and, as the county commission’s budget chair Edmund Ford Jr. pointed out to his colleagues on Monday at the advice of county trustee Regina Newman, the county cannot bill or collect on the extra millennial digit in the figure of $3.451, the hypothetical rate projected so far. It must go up to a figure rounding off at $3.46 or go down to $3.45.
Going up to a rate of $3.46 would generate for the county the previously mentioned additional amount of $2,229,999. But it would mean (shhhhhh!) raising taxes, technically. The alternative would be to go down by a millennial digit to $3.45, which might mean sacrificing a proposed roster position or two or three. That’s the pending choice for county commission members that Ford presented to them at Monday’s meeting, as the commission contemplated the choices it will have to make by its projected budget deadline of Monday, June 7th.
Either way, taxpayers will note that anti-“windfall” provisions of the state-certified rate, based on the most recent countywide property appraisal, call for a reduction in the current tax rate, which is $4.05. You can call that progress.
• The Shelby County Commission completed action begun in committee sessions last Wednesday, formalizing by a vote of 11-0 its request that Governor Bill Lee repudiate recently passed legislation prohibiting the teaching of “critical race theory” in public schools. The body also adopted amendments from Commissioner Mick Wright noting a “lack of clarity” in the bill in distinguishing between rejecting racism and ignoring the fact of it, as the bill seems to call for.
Monday was the last commission meeting attended by Carolyn Watkins as administrator of Shelby County Government’s equal opportunity compliance program. Watkins was recently appointed by Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland to fill the city judgeship left vacant by the death of Teresa Jones. She is being succeeded in her county position by Shep Wilbun. Both Watkins and Wilbun were formally honored by the commission on Monday, as was Sheriff Floyd Bonner, by joint proclamation of the commission and Mayor Lee Harris.
