Buffalo will begin employing frequent revaluations so that property values are closer to 100%, Mayor Byron W. Brown has vowed.
The net effect is that property tax increases and the use of nonrecurring revenue would be less of a necessity to balance future city budgets, though Brown is adamant that that would not be his motivation for reassessing properties more often.
“It has nothing to do with that at all,” the mayor said in a telephone interview last week. “It’s just a matter of equity so people are paying their fair share based on the value of their home.”
Council members cut about $2 million from Mayor Byron W. Brown’s suggested spending plan. ShotSpotters are out. So are increases to user fees. And property tax hikes are lower than originally proposed.
In a meeting with The Buffalo News Editorial Board on May 13, Brown defended his proposed 5% residential property tax increase – which the Common Council trimmed a week later – in his $568 million spending plan for the 2022-23 fiscal year. Overall, including commercial property, Brown had proposed hiking taxes by 4.5%, a figure the Council cut to 3.5% when it approved a budget on May 20.
Brown had characterized his tax increase proposal as modest. The mayor noted that, without the additional revenue from the tax increase and nonrecurring revenue sources – such as the multimillions in federal stimulus funds and casino revenue – he would have had to cut proposed increases in youth employment programs, public safety and public works projects even though they are priorities for many city residents.
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“As we go forward, we want to phase out the use of any one-shots,” Brown said then. “The one-shots were used in last year’s budget, this year’s budget and the next year’s budget because of the impact of the pandemic.”
Raising taxes this year, Brown argued before the Council slashed $2 million from his plan, would allow revenue from the nonrecurring sources to compound and, by the third and fourth years of his unprecedented fifth term in office, provide even more revenue for the city to move away from one-shot budget-balancing measures.
In amending the mayor’s proposal, the Council cut a $250,000 expenditure for ShotSpotter technology in the Buffalo Police Department after residents, advocates and community leaders criticized the plan. ShotSpotters use audio sensors to register the sound of gunfire and determine where it came from, all within a minute before alerting police. Critics, however, have questioned its accuracy.
The Council also eliminated Brown’s proposed 4% increase in the recycling and user fee.
“The city has not relied on property tax increases for most of the time that I’ve been in office. We’ve either held the line on property taxes or cut the property tax rate,” said Brown.
“What this would do is just give people a sense of the accurate value of their home,” Brown added in regard to pursuing more regular revaluations.
The mayor said he had not pursued more frequent reassessments in the past “because our plan was to reduce the tax burden in the City of Buffalo.”
The aim, he said, was to reduce property taxes to make the city more attractive for residential and commercial investment.
“When I came into office in 2006, there were some surrounding municipalities that we had a higher tax rate than. There were other upstate cities that we had a higher tax rate than. Now we have the lowest tax rate of most major upstate cities, and a lower tax rate than our largest neighboring suburban municipalities,” Brown said.
The mayor added that the current demand for more city services encouraged him to propose an increase in the tax levy, which is the amount collected in taxes.
Before the Council and the mayor’s financial team negotiated a cut in the tax increase that Brown initially proposed, the mayor said the increase in the levy would not have had a significant impact on the taxes most homeowners are already paying.
“We think it makes sense now to raise the tax levy after the census numbers have come in showing that we are a city of over 278,000 people. So we wanted to spread the tax burden over more residents in the City of Buffalo,” Brown said on May 13.
Brown said that for 70% of homeowners in the city, the tax increase is less than $50.
Brown said the biggest increase would have been borne mostly by some of the city’s wealthiest homeowners in the Delaware and a portion of the Niagara Council districts, who could expect to see increases of over $100.
“We think, even in those cases, it would still be modest,” he said.
Brown noted that this is his 17th budget proposal, and some have questioned why he has not raised taxes incrementally over the years.
“I will say that, first of all, Council members have never raised that question before,” the mayor said.
Brown, who had raised taxes only once in the last 16 years, said that he has been clear with his budget management team about tax policy since he was first elected.
“We wanted to lower the tax rate or hold the line on the tax rate to make Buffalo more attractive to residential and commercial investment. We’ve been able to accomplish that,” he said.
Brown noted that both the current residential and commercial property tax rates are less than half what they were when he first took office in the 2005-06 fiscal year. The residential tax rate was $20.95 per $1,000 of assessed valuation, while the commercial rate was $37.41 per $1,000.
The current residential rate is $9.88 per $1,000, and the current commercial property tax rate is $17.21.
The new residential tax rate for 2022-23 is set for $10.27 per $1,000, and the commercial rate is set at $18.17.
“For 14 years in Buffalo, people’s tax rate either stayed the same or went down at a time when every other bill that they paid went up,” said Brown.
Brown said the last citywide revaluation was in 2019, and took effect in 2020.
