Bloomington residents | Facebook
Bloomington residents | Facebook
The City of Bloomington council held a special meeting to approve the tentative 2022 tax levy.
“You can see across the bottom that ... our rates really have stayed pretty constant over the last few years,” Scott Rathbun, the finance director for the city, said. “This year we're actually looking at a slight decrease. Now, one other point I wanted to add is that ... with the inflation ... the plus 8% inflationary impact that's going to be hitting the city as well as the library. And what we're spending and proposing with this, dedicating these revenues to the police, higher fire pensions, is that we'll be making the rest of that increase up from the other source revenues within the general fund.”
The city uploaded a Livestream of its special meeting to the city’s YouTube channel.
Rathbun presented the levy to the board. The board must submit its final levy to the county assessor by the end of December, but it also must publicly approve a tentative amount for public knowledge beforehand. Rathbun explained that both the inflation rate and the local equalized assessed value (EAV) and new property rates for Bloomington were both huge increases from last year.
The meeting’s agenda noted the total of the proposed tax levy is approximately $2 billion.
The city is proposing to realize the EAV increase while keeping a flat tax rate, so it would be able to gain an additional $1.4 million without raising the tax rate for residents. The increased tax levy money would go to public pensions, while the rest of the money followed the same funding patterns as the previous year. The city will ask for a levy of $22,320,384.
The public library is completely dependent on the tax levy for its funding. The city will add an additional $403,000 for the 2022 levy, with $235,000 going to their debt service and $168,000 going to their operations fund. The increased tax levy for the city should also offset some of the decreased utility revenue that the city has been seeing, and should put the city closer to a surplus budget.
The council will meet again at 6 p.m. on Dec. 5 at the Government Center Chamber on the fourth floor in room 400 at 115 East Washington St.
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