BRYAN, Texas — A Brazos County court vote is changing the way a significant amount of property taxpayers will make their payments, and given the economic climate, some taxpayers are facing a double whammy they might not be able to recover from.
“It just seems absolutely irresponsible and tone deaf given everything that’s going on, nationally and locally, for this decision to be made,” said Casey Oldham, the CEO and CIO of Oldham Goodwin group in Bryan-College Station.
A significant group of Brazos County taxpayers are angry.
Because of a commissioners court vote last week, Brazos County property owners who choose to split their tax payments, 10 percent of the county’s property tax payers, don’t have that option anymore.
“This last legislative session, there were a lot of changes made to the tax code. If any tax jurisdiction were to adopt a tax over a specific cap for increase. Then instead of having the local taxpayers decide whether they want to vote on that or not, they’ve mandated an automatic election,” said Kristeen Roe, the Brazos County Tax Assessor/Collector.
Basically, the county want to give taxpayers the ability to vote on tax increases, and if that kind of change is voted on, pushing the whole payments to be due at once gives more time for tax collectors to get all the paperwork done.
Given the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, though, that decision can hit taxpayers hard.
"Doing away with that will now require Brazos County residents who use that split payment option to go ahead and still have to make that second property tax payment in this coming June in the middle of a pandemic, and then pay their full taxes for 2020 in the middle of a pandemic, its extremely disturbing," Oldham said.
On top of that, Brazos County had already voted to increase taxes by about 8 percent.
So just to give an example, in their split payment, Oldham Goodwin group will owe the county about $3 million this June, in the winter, they’ll now have to pay their total property tax value of about $6 million.
If you add that tax increase, that’s about $10 million dollars paid within months.
Oldham said, “businesses are completely closed down and they barely have enough revenues to make the June property tax payment. Now tell me how anybody, given this pandemic can ‘budget’ for that in the next 8 months. It just wasn’t thought through.”
So is there a chance to fix this, at least for the time being?
“There’s been a lot of discussion across the state trying to decide what are the options here. Whether this type of disaster would put in place another payment option for people. We simply don’t know what the answer is right now,” Roe said.
A lot of things are up in the air right now, but Oldham says people who are upset by this should contact their commissioners and let them know they’re unhappy.
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