Under proposed millage rates set by the county government and school system, Pickens homeowners will see steep increases on their property tax bills.
The Progress asked Chief Appraiser Roy Dobbs to figure a tax bill based on a $200,000 house, using the proposed 2009 rates. According to the accompanying calculations, the tax bill on the sample house would rise by more than $300 this year.
The $200,000 value was chosen as this represents a “run of the mill house” in Pickens County, according to Dobbs. Obviously bills will be higher for higher priced homes and lower for those with lower assessed values.
Below the assessed value in the accompanying chart, the next line shows the 40 percent value. It is standard practice across Georgia to use a 40 percent value for tax purposes.
The sample home shows the $5,000 homestead exemption granted in Pickens County to those that have applied. According to records at the Board of Tax Assessors office, 7,313 homes have applied for the homestead exemption. This represents slightly less than half of all eligible properties in the county.
While tax bills were bound to rise with higher millage rates, the jump would have been only a little over $100 if the state’s Homeowners Tax Relief Grant was still in place. That program, begun in 2000, provided state funds on a flat per home basis to all counties to help them roll back property taxes. The rollback was $8,000 per Georgia household in 2008.
The state announced last year it would discontinue these funds for the next year due to budgetary problems at the state level. State Senator Chip Pearson discusses this issue in his column on Page 4B this week. He notes the program was created to disburse this grant when there were surplus funds at the state level.
Had Georgia continued the grant this year, the tax bill for each property owner in Pickens County would have gone down by $179.84.
A tax estimator is available online at http://gaassessors.com that will show the taxes for a home by putting in its value. This is a service of the local assessors’ office through qpublic.net. Follow links to Pickens County when you reach the site.
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