Glen Blackmon is a fellow economist, and knows exactly how to twist and torture data until it gives him the answer he wants.
First, by choosing his base year carefully, he does choose a window of time when my taxes rose a little slower than inflation. By including 2023 inflation, which assessment and taxes have not yet caught up with, he makes a point that is accurate arithmetically, but flawed substantively.
I chose a 17-year period of actual payments, a long enough period to avoid temporal hiccups like the high inflation in 2022-23. The graph speaks for the actual property tax payments I have made over that time, and actual inflation for the same period from the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.
Yes, property tax RATES have gone down, because assessed value has gone up sharply. And yes, my property tax bill, which has risen faster than inflation, includes more taxing jurisdictions than just the City of Olympia. Glenn is not "wrong" about those statements.
My point is that MY property tax bill has gone up far more than inflation since 2017, a six-year period. The City Manager said property taxes have not kept up with inflation. Apparently the City manager's tax bill is different from my own.
The problem that the Olympia City Council can address is the massive shift of millions of dollars of property tax responsibility from large apartment developers to the rest of us, through the Multi-Family Tax Exemption (MFTE). That is a place that is causing OUR property tax BILLS to rise faster than inflation. To subsidize millionaire developers.
Please explain the inappropriate content below.
