arg. italicizing isn't working anymore.

Quote: "Now the city's Finance Department has weighed in, saying the plan wouldn't dent revenues if more than 500,000 new residents (don't) move in." End Quote

Why only consider the revenue side of that ledger?
And why do they insist on looking at only one revenue stream for that matter.

How would revenues be affected if the 200-300,000 residents who suck down the most services were to move out? If they did... is it reasonable to assume that the "housing stock" they presently use would be taken up by people who don't suck down City services?

REGARDLESS of what the property tax rate is... the City needs to attract people who will pay INCOME TAXES and will not suck down City services.

There are ways to achieve the larger goals (a higher earning citizenry paying lower property tax rates on owner occupied property) but approaching these goals piecemeal and trimming around the edges won't do it.

I'd like to pay less in taxes. But what's the contingency plan if people don't move in? It's politically a hecuva lot harder to raise tax rates than to lower them. So what do you do if it doesn't work, or even doesn't work rapidly enough? That's what I want to hear from Rolley, Pugh, and the other candidates supporting this idea.

State Senator Bill Ferguson was at my community meeting (46 District) last night. I asked him about property taxes and he said that Carl Stokes' plan is unrealistic. He said that it does need to be addressed though.

bryanintowson might be bryaninhamilton or bryaninlauraville were it not for property taxes. I live in a neighborhood in towson that looks much like ones in north or northeast baltimore and feels it. I purchased my home there because it offered me a city-like lifestyle without the horrendous property tax rates of Baltimore City.

If tax rates had parity with the County, homeowners like me would be more apt to buy a beautiful old house in Baltimore City because we would not feel hamstrung by the tax rate and secondly, feeling like there was no return for your investment.

Why pay the highest taxes if your money goes towards the worst schools in the state, a corrupt (sorry BPD, but the whole thing with the towing makes you look really, really bad) police department, and badly maintained roads?

Sentiment can only take you so far but the real answers are with the gelt.

I think the lure comes from setting the plan out over a few years, so that potential new residents know that every year for a certain amount of years the property tax rate will be incrementally lower.

That can encourage people to purchase in the city and allow for any drop in revenue to be spread out.

It isn't about lowering the property tax rate or increasing the hotel tax rate; it's about LESS SPENDING by those in power. You can bring in additional money in any number of ways, but if you keep spending (or mis-spending)that money, the additional monies from taxation won't help reduce deficits or entice people to move into the city. Politicians need to STOP SPENDING STOP SPENDING STOP SPENDING.

Just yesterday I drove from to and from my Remington home to Erickson Retirement Community in Catonsville on city streets. What I experienced was terribly maintained roadways (has anyone driven down North Ave lately? Jeez ow.), I saw no police cars in some of the roughest parts of town which hosts many vacant homes. I did see an "OTIS FOR MAYOR" sign hanging above a liquor storefront on Fulton, though.

What exactly is that millage rate of $2.268 paying for in this city? A more important question: What the city would look like if the deficit was 2x as large, or even 10x as large. Any different? Would I be driving on crappy roads through depressed neighborhoods? Most likely, yes. Would the schools be pathetic? Yes, most definitely. Would I see few or no police cars in the roughest part of town? Yes.

The answer is the same because the players are always the same. Our city government is staffed not with visionaries but people who have been groomed through a tired and corrupt political system that rewards loyalty over creativity. While it is quite possible that our city could plunge into deeper chaos if the property tax rate was slashed, I can't really see it getting much worse.

My vote is to lower the rate and watch what happens. I predict that it can't get a whole lot worse at this point. perhaps a startling lack of revenue is just what the city needs to really make the cuts it needs to make. Our police force is too large. There are permit and licensing offices that stifle small business from proliferating. Our elected leaders are way too cozy with real estate developers. Perhaps if the city had absolutely no money, our leaders woul have the courage to change these things.

Really bad economics is saying you can cut the tax rate in half and revenues will be unaffected, or perhaps even increase just because that happened once in San Francisco at the dawn of the explosion of Silicon Valley.

Argue for tax cuts, but pair it with some spending cuts for realism's sake. The city spends 14% of its general fund paying pensions to people who no longer provide any benefit to the city, that's about as much as it spends on education (17.1%). It spends 37.3% of its general fund on public safety, how much of that goes to policing, trying, and and jailing non-violent drug offenders? How many deputy mayors do we have, something like 4 or 5? How many side streets get repaved smooth as glass while major arteries that connect to 95 like Lombard, and Eastern remain pothole ridden?

How many $200 waterfront office towers like the new Harbor East Legg Mason building pay ZERO property taxes for the next 15-25 years?

The city doesn't give a damn as long as the politically unconnected whites pay all the taxes. Federal Hill, Locust Point, Fells Point and Canton should leave the city

I haven't seen anyone say that you can cut property taxes without it effecting revenue; however, I have seen many people argue that short-term budget problems can be overcome as they were in cities like San Francisco, Boston, and Oakland...

Cutting the tax rate in half in five years is unrealistic any way you look at it. The time it takes to renovate a home from a shell to something a middle class family would live in is approximately a year, and the truth is there isn't a lot of demand in the areas where you still can find shells (try to find one in Canton or Fed Hill).

The realistic approach is to do just what Jody suggested and make a significant, but not drastic cut over the next five years (say 15-20%) with the plan to reduce more as tax receipts increase. Once the population understands that taxes are going down you will drive up demand for housing in Baltimore for middle class residents. As that increases, you not only collect increased property taxes, but you collect 3% income tax from people making $50K+/year instead of the current $25K/year and your tax revenue goes up even more.

It's all a positive feedback loop, and it all starts with one significant decrease in the property tax rate. Lets just hope we can elect someone who is willing to take that first step, because the status quo is simply not working.

Here's the thing...We in Baltimore have been paying the highest rate in the state for probably decades, yet as someone else previously mentioned we have the worst roads and generally average to below average services.

Do we really expect that because we leave the tax rate "as is" that anything will change from the already decades long decline? It's time to elect people who are willing to take on risks for rewards. We need to explore new opportunities to improve the city. And I don't see how, just leaving things status quo are going to get us where we need to go, together, as a City.

Has anyone bothered closely analyzing what exactly Boston and San Francisco did to make the cut in the tax rate work? If it's worked in two other cities, the blueprint should be laid out for how to successfully approach a cut in the property tax rate. Josh Dowlut also raises a good point- you can't let businesses come in here and pay 0 in property taxes for 20 years. To make up the lost revenue in property tax from homeowners, the city ought to start collecting property tax from places such as Legg Mason, even from non-profit organizations, which Baltimore seems to have quite a lot of.

Here's the thing about this property tax argument: its proponents (specifically Steve Walters from Loyola, a conservative idealogue) always say "it worked in San Francisco!" Look, San Francisco has A LOT more to offer potential new residents than Baltimore. Baltimore can't compete with a city like SF on any level. And maybe people weren't so eager to live there because of low property taxes. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the WEATHER is superb. Some things Baltimore can't change and the weather is one of them. And for that reason alone Baltimore will NEVER be as desirable a place to live as SF. If there are no jobs (and there are NO jobs in Bal) people wont move here even if taxes are zero.

While everyone likes the idea of reduced taxes, people skip over the details of these plans by talking about them in abstract concepts. No one ever talks about the cut in the budget necessitated by these proposals. The number is $450 to $500+ million, EVERY YEAR. That's a lot of real money. I attended a discussion featuring Mr. Walters (the Loyola professor) as the speaker. I directly asked him about this issue, how does the budget get cut deep enough to balance these cuts (the city, like all municipal budgets of course can't run a deficet). He had no response other than to refer back to his belief in the urgency for a dramatic cut and speculate that the hit wouldn't be long or deep and maybe the city could bridge the gap with bonds or state help. That is ludicrious and irresponsible on its face. He also didn't address the distinct problem that given that housing values across the entire country have plummeted and show no signs of a quick recovery, depsite te abundant availabiity of cheap mortgage (rates are under 4.5%), there is no reason to beleive that there would be a surge in home buying to even begin to make up for the shortfall in revenue created by the cut. (His response was to take issue with the cause of problems in the housing market. He frankly seemed more invested in the notion of defending his idea--the correlation between shapr property tax reductions and the improvements in housing investment, kind of a Laffer Curve for property taxes-- than addresing the obvious and very real problems his proposal would create. He brought up the fact that the SF cut was during the Reagan recession of the early 80's, which of course overlooks the fact that that recession was vastly different than the circumstances we face now in the housing market and the effect on housing finance.) While I pay a lot for taxes and live in the city, I would certainly leave if the investment in police, fire, and schools were reduced. Similarly, I think many more people would leave and much more quickly if those commitments were reduced as well. You can't just say "cut the tax in half and then not address how you reduce the budget at the same time. That being the case, there's no purpose to any of these discussions unless and until people match actual cuts with the size of the tax cut they are proposing. Anything else simply is neither credible nor responsible.

I've read the Walters paper. He cites San Fran and Boston. He goes into great detail on San Fran, citing that by 3 years after the tax cut, and it was a dramatic cut of roughly halving the rate, total property taxes were back up to their pre- cut levels. The major driver here was the development of the entire personal computer/software industry that was going on just down the street.

He cites Boston as a property tax cut success story, but omits the revenue detail he goes into when citing San Fran.

B, For most of the 1950's, 1960's, and 1970's, San Francisco was losing people and jobs even faster than Baltimore was. Many crime rates were also higher in San Francisco than they were in Baltimore. San Francisco's weather was better than Baltimore's back then too, but San Francisco was declining more quickly than we were.

Also, Boston experienced a similar turnaround after a large property tax cut. Their weather is even worse than ours.

Baltimore can elevate itself. All is not lost!

@BaltimoreGeof I totally agree with you that "there's no purpose to any of these discussions unless and until people match actual cuts with the size of the tax cut they are proposing."

This is really a worthless discussion. SRB is most likely going to win this election because her challengers will split up the opposing votes among each other. When it comes time to talk about tax reform in the city, the administration will have a document they can fall back on that explains why they can't approach this issue now (or ever).

RomanTotale3d: Drastic cuts in the property tax rate would cause a budget crisis in the short-run. Over time, the tax base would grow, and revenues would be even greater than they are now: this was the case in San Francisco and Boston.

So, the big issue is how to weather the short-term storm. It seems to me that there are many options that do NOT involve cutting City services. The City could borrow money, sell assets (including abandoned houses), privatize, tax non-profits, promise a tax cut 3-5 years before it takes effect...the list goes on and on. I don't know which options are best, but there are many options.

Furthermore, what makes think that we will have any chance of maintaining the current level of City services under the status quo? We already seem to have a budget crisis every year. People and jobs keep moving out. In the long-run, I think that property tax rates comparable to the rest of the State will improve the City's budget outlook.

Stephen Walters referring to "really bad economics" is pretty funny in itself, considering how far he is to the right of most mainstream economists.

Umm how about decreasing the budget below the revenue line? No kidding it will be impossible to do without cuts! I love how that's the first thing these careerist politican power succubuses throw at Walters' plan.

This city's budget is bigger than Philly's and they have double our population. The reality, as the first poster said, is that the revenue is being eaten up by the ever-burgeoning population of social parasites.

BTW @ donato, without the neighborhoods you mentioned, this city would have either crumbled into the Chesapeake or have been burned down by riots.

Get in on it.

Matt, what makes you say that? Holding up San Francisco and Boston as cities to emulate doesn't seem very right-wing to me.

commuter tax combined with property tax reduction.

The Walters paper:

http://www.mdpolicy.org/docLib/20110126_MarylandJournalWaltersIntro.pdf

The crown jewel of his argument is Figure 1 on page 41. That bounce happens the exact same year IBM releases their first PC just down the street. Also, it appears that Figure 2 represents total tax revenue, not just property tax revenue. I'd like to know for certain that there were no off-setting tax increases in other areas as is often common. In other words, are the revenue numbers representing a tax cut, or a tax shift? Did San Fran increase another tax to account for the 1981 to 1982 jump by a factor of 2, when population had only ticked up a hair by that point?

Property tax is THE compelling reason why more people won't move into the city. My wife and I have talked about moving downtown once our grandkids are a little older but the outrageous property tax is prohibitive. My brother Jody and I have talked about this issue for many years. He has a plan. People should read his idea's on his web site www.LandersForMayor.com

The current tax structure does not benefit those who want to improve their properties, in turn improving the quality of life in their neighborhoods. I, as a tax paying, home owning citizen, and a member of the middle class, I see the city’s tax policy as destructive and completely non-rewarding to those who improve their properties.

If the tax rate where lowered, I know I would be improving the exterior of my home. As it stands now, I have a 6 foot fence to hide the addition that I put onto the rear of my house because I don’t want to pay and extra $500 per year in property taxes. Also as it stands now I will not remove the Formstone and re-point the brick on my house’s façade because it is an obvious sign that the condition of the property has improved which will trigger a property tax increase.

The tax policy, as it stands, now is dangerous because it creates a large disincentive for pulling building permits (when you pull the permit, it is registered as an improvement on the property), and for improving/replacing aging infrastructure on one’s property.

It is time for a property tax cap to be made on a statewide level of 1.99% to make sure that all jurisdictions have a rate that is non-oppressive. This will not affect other counties; however, it will make Maryland’s tax policy be more stable, predictable, and competitive.

M Riesner makes a great point and I agree 100%. I actually worry if my repaired slate roof and repointed chimney will increase my taxes.

Either have lower taxes and a leaky roof or higher taxes and a dry attic. Oh Baltimore, you crazy!

Dean thanks for the link. I'm sending it around.

I met Jody Landers at the Farmer's Market. It does appear that this is a major issue for him.

I'm late to this party, but only because it was yesterday that I found out that commercial property owners (including landlords) pay ludicrously lower tax rates than comparable residential properties. Why not assess those properties the same way residential properties are assessed, with comps, and collecting more revenue. Millions of dollars a year are lost because of this weird practice.