A speaker at the Nov 10th, 2005 Council meeting disagreed with TUF's opinion about Ms. Danile's talk stating that she was correct so we again listened to her talk. In doing so we found no consequential difference in the our conclusion though we realized that we did make a mistake, as best we can tell Ms. Danile's error was worse than we originally thought.

Feel free to stop reading here, as stated there is no consequential difference in the conclusion and the following explanation is complicated. Ms. Danile creates a tax model to see what happens when you increase taxes equal to community growth. To do so she increases the levy (the portion of the budget the taxpayers are required to pay) %10, the assessment 10% and the and number of houses (we assume she means properties) by 10%. She starts with a tax rate of $0.42/hundred and ends with a tax rate of $0.40/hundred. When we first looked at this we did not include the increase in assessments and stated that the tax rate should be the same. We were wrong. When you add the increase in assessments then the tax rate decreases just as she said it would but her calculations show a 5% decrease in tax rate (from .42 to .4). Add that to a 10% increase in assessments and you get taxes go up not down as she claimed. Now don't take this as the assessments causing taxes to go up take it as a math error. According to her own calculations taxes should have increased not decreased.

When we calculate taxes with the little amount of information she provided assuming a starting tax rate of $0.42 you should we get an ending tax rate of $0.3818, add in the assessment and there is no change in taxes, exactly what we stated initially.

Again don't take this as the assessments causing taxes to go up, if you take assessments out of these equations, i.e. zero appreciation then taxes stay even. Why, because spending only increased equal to the increase in the size of the community. No one needed a long talk to get that message across, we all know if you increase spending 10% but you have 10% more people to pay then there is no increase in taxes.

The problem is that spending has been increasing faster than the rate of growth in the community.