County releases delinquent tax list
 
Brian Ahern
bahern@thespectrum.com
The Spectrum
 
ST. GEORGE - Washington County released its 2010 delinquent tax list this week, and officials say collection rates continue the lower-than-normal trend of recent years.

With property tax collection rates hovering around 90 percent the past few years, County Administrator Dean Cox said the burden of keeping the county's budget afloat continues to shift more heavily to those who are responsible with their tax payments.

"It's a problem for the county and it's a problem for all the other taxpayers," he said. "The state adjusts the mill levy to compensate for that."

County Auditor Kim Hafen said property taxes are the second-highest source of revenue for the county and rates for those taxes are inexplicably linked to the success in collecting them.

Every December the county locks in the following year's budget while predicting how much tax revenue will be received during that year. Any discrepancies between how much is predicted and how much is collected, Hafen added, would have to be made up in the form of higher rates.

"The county operates all year on the money that won't be collected until November and December," he said. "If the collection rates are going down, then that means the tax rates go up."

An example of this could be seen in the county's 2011 budget. When the preliminary budget was proposed in November, the county had collected about $3.9 million out of the nearly $14 million tax collection budget. The county will not know until the end of the year how much of that $14 million has been collected.

As for how much the tax rates are expected to change, Hafen said that is usually determined during the middle of the year.

"We do those calculations in May and June," he said.

The ramifications of festering delinquent property taxes could be seen in the town of Hildale.

Officials said more than 50 percent of residents there didn't pay their property taxes. Most of those holdouts were Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who refused to pay out of protest. To make up for the budget shortfall and to increase its revenue, the town decided in August to increase those taxes by more than 200 percent.

"We're in a situation that's tough on everybody," Hildale Mayor David Zitting said during the August Truth in Taxation hearings. "It's going to hurt a lot of people, but I don't know what else to do about it."

Though Hafen said Hildale's tax hike also had to do with increasing its revenue stream, he added that it showed just how painful a low tax collection rate can be on a community.

"If everything was in an equal world and evaluation rates and budgets stayed the same then people would pay the same thing every year," he said. "People pay more or less each year."
 
TheSpectrum.com
Originally published December 30, 2010
 
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