Guadalupe County tax rate set at a ‘considerable reduction’

Seguin, TX, USA / Seguin Today

Cindy Aguirre

2022 budget addresses emergency services 

(Seguin) — Guadalupe County is applauding all efforts in setting what it believes is a fair, conservative and a “considerable reduction” of its tax rate for 2022.  Guadalupe County Judge Kyle Kutscher made the announcement during this week’s meeting of the commissioners court.

“Right now, our tax rate for this year is .3799. If you look at the proposed tax rate .3439 – the no new revenue rate at .3372 and the voter approval rate at .4240,” said Kutscher.

Judge Kutscher says much of the applause for setting this year’s tax rate comes in lieu of the obstacles that didn’t make things easy.

“I do want to take a moment now under this section to thank our Tax-Assessor Collector Daryl John and his staff who had an extremely difficult job of trying to calculate rates for entities including the county this year because of the number of properties that were under protest at the point of July 25. Appraisal districts typically have 95 percent of the appraisal rolls certified and or more. In past years, under high protest years, we’ve had 2 to 3,000 properties under protest that may equate to $5, $6- $700,000 million of value. This year, about 7,000 properties under protest that equated to almost $2.5 billion of property still hanging out there in protest land, going through the process which we anticipated but not to that level and on top of that, had software go down that wasn’t working when the staff and office really needed it but they worked extremely hard to get – not only the county but all taxing jurisdictions information – they need it in a timely manner to do their best to make sure that they are accurate and definitely couldn’t do it without their help,” said Kutscher.

Even with the increased appraisals, Kutscher says he believes the county will see a lot of entities leave the tax rates “consistent or close to consistent.”

“I think this represents the type of leadership that we have here at the county and decisions – not only by commissioners court but by all departments understanding that taxpayers have been drastically impacted by the increased appraisals and we are only spending the funds that we need to be ready to provide the services that we need to provide to the public – to provide again those critical emergency services like police, fire, EMS, to build more roads, to take care of the critical services that most people want and they know they need so that’s what we focused on in this budget and that’s what this tax rate represents. It’s a considerable reduction but again, we have considerable new property being constructed – also had a considerable amount of increased appraisals so trying to do our best to be representative of what we need to do for the public and again it goes from .3799 to .3439,” said Kutscher.  

Again, that new rate is 34.39 cents per $100 of property valuation. The new tax rate represents a more than 3.5 cent decrease in the overall tax rate.

Kutscher says trying to set a responsible and conservative tax rate is nothing new for the court. He says data clearly illustrates the efforts that have been made over the years by the commissioners court.

“You can see back in 2005, it was right over 40 cents and it’s fluctuated a little bit but from 2014-2015, it stayed consistent really from 2012, it stayed consistent and reducing just a little bit and part of that is because we are part of a growing county and you see an appraisal increase and new construction but a big part of that also that has to be coupled with that growth is a conservative and consistent approach to spending tax payer dollars and I think that’s this court, previous court members, we know that we don’t do this all alone. It takes everybody working together and I know we are all proud to be able to do this and work with everybody here in the county to have a conservative tax rate,” said Kutscher.

Kutscher says of course, commissioners also spent all of last week putting the finishing touches on the new FY 2022-2023 budget – a budget that provided direction for this tax rate.

“Mainly emergency services with new law enforcement patrol positions, focused on fire protection with six new fire fighter positions also allocating funding from the America Rescue Plan Act to build a couple of county emergency response centers as well as partner potentially with one to two cities on the construction of joint fire stations and or emergency operations. We have increased in this budget, our capacity to be able to take care of our rights-of-ways and build roads really trying to push the envelope, be prepared for increased travel and traffic numbers on our county rights-of-ways which we have seen for a few years but we are starting to see even at a faster rate now and like I talked about, we have about $21-22 million of capital improvement projects funded just on the county side with an additional $32.5 million of America Rescue Plan Act funding which ranges from those emergency response centers all the way down to partnerships with the hospital and the food bank that have been instrumental during not only the pandemic but before and after,” said Kutscher. 

The budget may be viewed at the county clerk’s office or on the Guadalupe County homepage available at co.guadalupe.tx.us.

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