2020/06/29 - Mayor's Column: Property Tax Comparisons
“An Open Door to O’Fallon”
A Weekly Note from Mayor Herb Roach
This year’s property tax bills are now available to view on the St. Clair County website. Each year, when these documents are released, we begin to get a lot of questions about where your property taxes go and how they are spent.
Please keep in mind that the O’Fallon City Council decides the levy for the City of O’Fallon and O’Fallon Public Library only. All of O’Fallon’s other taxing bodies, such as St. Clair County, O’Fallon Township, and O’Fallon’s school districts, set their own property tax levy and the City Council has no control over their decisions.
The 2019 levy that the Council voted to approve last December (which sets the rate that property owners pay in 2020) included a 2.74% decrease. The final rate for 2019 is lowest rate since 2011.
The decrease approved by the City Council does not mean that your total property tax bill will be going down 2.74%. The amount of property tax paid to the Library and City of O’Fallon (which includes the Fire Department) makes up less than 2% and 11% of your total tax bill, respectively, so increases or decreases in these have a much smaller impact.
There is no one that can deny that property taxes are unpopular. Fortunately, O’Fallon is lucky to have a large sales tax base, which means that the City of O’Fallon does not have to rely on property taxes to fund basic city services, like police and streets. In fact, property tax in O’Fallon pays for only 2% of the City of O’Fallon’s total budget.
It has long been the policy of the City Council to fund the budget from sales tax and other revenue sources rather than property tax. For every $100 in property tax an O’Fallon taxpayer pays, the City of O’Fallon receives only $9.53. This means that the other $90.47, or 90.5% percent, of a property tax bill each person pays, can be used by the other taxing bodies in O’Fallon, like O’Fallon Township and Road District, St. Clair County, and O’Fallon’s school districts, to pay for the services they provide.
How does O’Fallon compare to some of the other Cities in St. Clair County? Using the median O’Fallon home value ($204,500) as a comparison, a taxpayer in St. Clair County pays an average of $1,107 in property tax to the city or village they live in. O’Fallon taxpayers pay $514, less than half of the average.
How does O’Fallon rank in comparison to the largest communities in the area? We used the average O’Fallon home price again to calculate and compare how much property tax each taxpayer pays to cities around the area (with population over 20,000) and ranked them from highest to lowest:
- East St. Louis: $2,476
- Granite City: $2,434
- Belleville: $1,774
- Alton: $1,712
- Edwardsville: $846
- Collinsville: $679
- O’Fallon: $514
Your elected officials understand that property tax is not an endless pot of money and that every one of you, as taxpayers, has the right to know where and how your tax dollars are being spent. I encourage you to visit the City of O’Fallon’s Finance Department’s website at http://www.ofallon.org/finance-department. On this site, you can view the City’s annual budget, audited financial reports, treasurer’s reports, and warrant reports – which is a list of payments made by the city, and approved by the City Council at every City Council Meeting.
As residents of O’Fallon, you should always be able to reach out to your elected officials and ask questions about what is happening in O’Fallon. Having open communications is important to me and something I care very deeply about. Thank you for reading, and please remember, my door is always open (virtually, at least)!