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2022/03/28 - Mayor's Column: Comparing Tax Rates

 

­“AN OPEN DOOR TO O’FALLON”
A WEEKLY NOTE FROM MAYOR HERB ROACH
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In last week’s article, I mentioned that we have lowered the City’s portion of the tax rate for the fifth straight year. Our new City property tax rate is at the lowest point that it has been in 35 years. You may wonder how that compares with comparable size cities around us.

Since all the tax rates that will be used for next year’s taxes aren’t available, we pulled last year's property tax rates that were used by O’Fallon and five other communities in Madison and St. Clair County that have a population of 20,000 or more. They are Alton, Belleville, Collinsville, Edwardsville, Granite City, and O’Fallon.

I’m very proud to let you know that the City of O’Fallon’s tax rate is the lowest of the six communities and we have lowered ours again this year.  The tax rates of the other five communities ranged anywhere from 35% to 290% higher than your O’Fallon City real-estate tax rate.

This doesn’t happen by accident. It is the result of a lot of discussions, planning, and hard work by the City Council and the Staff to be fiscally responsible when spending your tax dollars.

The work on such things as our new Master Plan, five-year Capital Improvement Plan, emergency preparedness plan, plans for the future of our parks, studies on our streets, water, storm water and sewer are extremely important in both the planning and prioritization of what we need to do and when we do it.

We all want to see our city to be safe, have solid infrastructure to support our current residents and businesses, to grow and continue to move forward with improvements but we must do it in a smart and fiscally responsible manner.

Our City Council will be doing a final review of our Budget for Fiscal Year 2022-23 and voting on it over the next few weeks.  Our new Fiscal Year begins on May 1, 2022.

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.