What does your property tax dollar pay for?
Just how is your tax dollar in Perkins County spent?
If you said a big share of it is spent on education you’d be right. But that’s not all your tax dollar supports.
Every property owner in Perkins County, whether they reside in the county or are an absentee owner, gets a property tax bill every year.
Annual property taxes in Nebraska come due at the end of each year, and are paid in arrears, with the first half of those taxes due by May 1 and the second half due by Sept. 1 of the following year.
For instance, the property tax bills mailed by the county treasurer for 2021 come due May 1, 2022 for the first half and Sept. 1, 2022 for the remaining half.
All property owners in the county pay for the operations of: Perkins County School District, Perkins County, Perkins County Health Services hospital district, Upper Republican Natural Resources District, Educational Service Unit #16, Mid Plains Community College and fire protection and cemetery operations in their respective districts.
Property owners inside the limits of the City of Grant and villages of Madrid, Venango and Elsie also pay for the operation of those city and village entities.
Those property taxes are on top of the taxes shown above that are paid by all county property owners.
As a result, that changes the proportion of what $1 dollar in property taxes covers.
For instance, of the $1 in taxes paid by a property owner in the City of Grant, $0.29 cents pays for the city operations, $0.19 for the county operations, $0.38 for Perkins County Schools and $0.12 for all of the other entities.
Conversely, rural property owners do not pay for those city or village operations, which changes the proportions of what each of their tax dollar supports.
Of the $1 in property taxes paid by the rural property owner, $0.27 goes to county operations, $0.53 to Perkins County Schools and $0.20 to the other entities.
To compile the tax levy for each of the respective taxing entities in the county, the amount of property tax requested is divided by the assessed property valuation for that entity.
For instance, county commissioners requested $3,563,087 in property taxes for county operations. The certified taxable value of all real property in Perkins County is $1,160,629,015.
Dividing the county’s total assessed value into the property tax request results in a tax levy rate of $0.306996 for every $100 of property valuation.
The levies for all of the taxing entities are then totalled to determine the combined tax levy paid by property owners.
For rural property in the Grant fire district, the levy for 2021 is $1.117892 per $100 of valuation.
For property owners inside the city limits of Grant, their levy of $0.458333 is added to the rural levy, bringing the total levy for Grant to $1.576225.
When comparing the tax bill for a house valued at $250,000, that house in rural Perkins County would have a tax bill of $2,795.
The same house located within the city limits of Grant would also be paying taxes for city operations in Grant. The tax bill for that same house in town would be $3,940.