The city of Mission is opting to maintain the same property tax rate for the 2022-23 fiscal year.
Last week, the city council unanimously agreed to keep their property tax rate at 52.99 cents per $100 of valuation, making next fiscal year the third year in a row that the city has been at the rate.
On Wednesday, Mission Mayor Norie Gonzalez Garza said the council didn’t want to raise taxes, and didn’t even consider it, which is why they chose to keep it at the current rate.
The current tax rate is expected to bring in $22,786,290 this fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30. For the next fiscal year, the same rate is projected bring in an additional $1,780,246 for the city.
For the city to bring the same amount of revenue next year that it did for this current year, the city would have had to adopt the No New Revenue Tax Rate which, for Mission, would be 48.85 cents per $100 of valuation.
On the possibility of lowering the property tax rate, Garza said that due to high costs caused by inflation this year, she said that wasn’t something they were able to do. However, she left the door open to lowering the tax rate next year.
For several years, the city had resisted raising taxes under former Mayor Norberto “Beto” Salinas who lowered the property tax rate from 64 cents when he first took office in 1998 to 48 cents for the 2017-18 fiscal year.
After Armando O’Cana became mayor in 2018, the city raised taxes by 3.5 cents for the 2019-2020 fiscal year after staff projections showed the city’s general fund balance would have been in the red if taxes were lowered or even if the rate remained the same.
That increase led to a 52.12 cent property tax rate and, the following year, the council increased the rate further to the current rate of 52.99 cents.
A public hearing on the proposed tax rate will be held on Sept. 12 at city hall.
