Area residents see decrease in tax rates

Dalondo Moultrie The Seguin Gazette

Some area residents will see a decrease in their respective school districts’ tax rates.

A pair of Guadalupe County school boards recently approved their proposed tax rates for the 2023-24 school year, both with decreases for tax payers.

Seguin ISD and Navarro ISD’s boards unanimously approved tax rates at meetings Aug. 29 and Aug. 30, respectively. The drop in taxes is, in part, due to changes the Texas Education Agency made for the new school year, Seguin ISD Superintendent Matthew Gutierrez said.

“TEA has mandated a Maintenance & Operations (M&O) tax rate of $0.7316 for the 2023-24 school year,” he said. “This is a reduction of $0.1330 from the prior year, which means that the taxpayer can expect to see a savings of $133 for every $100,000 in their home value.”

Seguin’s proposed debt service tax is $0.3850 for a combined tax rate of $1.1166. In the 2022-23 year, Seguin’s M&O rate was $0.8646 while the debt service rate sat at $0.3850.

A taxpayer with a home worth $150,000 can expect to pay $1,674.90 in annual school taxes for the 2023-24 year while a property owner with a home valued at $200,000 can expect to pay $2,233.20. The savings from year to year equal about $200 for a home valued at $150,000 and $266 for one valued at $200,000, according to information the district provided during its school board meeting.

Navarro ISD’s board authorized its M&O rate at $0.7251 and debt service at $0.415, the district’s Chief Financial Officer Paul Neuhoff said. That comes to a total tax of $1.1401 per $100,000 taxable value, he said.

For the 2022-23 school year, the average taxable value for a home in the district sat at $262,623, Neuhoff said. That amounted to taxes of $3,528.34 but things changed this year, he said.

For a home with the average taxable value in the district of $236,579, taxpayers this year can expect to pay $2,697.24, a decrease of $831.10, Neuhoff said.

“The decrease is coming from the tax compression that the Legislature required,” Neuhoff said. “In addition, the average homestead exemption value we had to calculate went from $40,000 to $100,000. That’s why you saw the average taxable value went down, though the market value went up.”

Legislators increased the homestead exemption and provided tax compression that caused maintenance and operation rates to be smaller, he said.

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