Certified Tax Rate 2021
| By now, most Loudon County property owners have
received their property reappraisal letters from the county Property
Assessors's office. About ninety percent of us have seen our property
values increase, some by a lot.
Every four years, Loudon County property owners are faced with property reappraisals. This is the process whereby the state takes all kinds of information pertaining to our county and cities property, sticks it in a computer and comes up with new values for our property. One of the main factors in the reappraisal process are sales prices of land and homes. When area sales prices go up, that's reflected in the value of like properties. For the past four years, land and home sales values have continued to go up, thus the values placed on our homes and lands have also gone up. But, importantly, just because your property values have gone up, that does not necessarily mean you're going to pay higher property taxes. In fact, state law prohibits local governments from collecting additional property taxes on reappraisal. That means when property values go up, tax rates must go down. So, since Loudon County property values have gone up, our property tax rate will come down accordingly. For most of us whether our property taxes actually go up will be determined by the county commission and city councils. The new lower tax rate, as calculated by the state and Property Assessor's office, is called "The New Certified Tax Rate." Local officials can, by a vote, adopt "The New Certified Tax Rate." In contrast they can also adopt a tax rate higher than "The New Certified Tax Rate." If they do that your property taxes will absolutely go up. Currently, Loudon County's property tax rate is $1.80 per $100 of assessed value, fifth lowest in the state. While the new certified tax rate is not known yet, the new certified tax rate could drop by as much as thirty cents, more or less, which will keep your tax bill at about the same as last year. Lenoir City's current property tax rate is $0.99 per $100 assessed value and Loudon City's rate is $1.23 per $100 assessed value. If you live in one of these cities, you pay both county and city property taxes. So if the city and county both raise property taxes, you folks will get a double whammy. Some local governments have, in the past, taken advantage of reappraisal to jack up your property taxes. They used the confusion of reappraisals to slip in a secret "stealth" property tax increase by NOT adopting the "new certified tax rate" after reappraisals. Everyone must keep a close eye on your local elected officials to be sure they don't try to sneak in a property tax increase on us. We may not learn the new certified tax rate for a few weeks yet, but when we do, I'll certainly pass that on to everyone. As far as I'm concerned, we pay plenty of taxes now. We don't need to pay anymore. Below is a link to a good video produced by the state explaining the reappraisal process. Watch and listen to it closely. Also a link to some interesting facts and figures pertaining to the county demographics compiled by Mike Campbell, Loudon County Property Assessor. Also a link to the state website where you can look at property tax rates across the state since 1997. Type Loudon in the search box and you can see the county and two city rates over the years. |
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4/12/21