Madison County Commissioners discuss tax rate changes at special-called meeting

MADISON COUNTY, Tenn. — A special called Madison County Commission meeting was held Monday to discuss the tax rate.

“We’ve had an issue with the state when we were doing the reappraisals, and they came back and they’ve taken it over, and it’s been sort of slow, we usually have everything in place by July but they sort of, they sorta dragged their feet in my opinion,” said Commissioner Doug Stephenson.

This tax rate is based off of the appeals that came through the Board of Equalization. The tax rate changed by .0020%, going from 1.8716 to 1.8736.

“The preliminary tax rate was adopted on June 30th at a rate of 1.8559 due to the appeals that went out after the tax notices,” said Madison County Finance Director Karen Bell. “With the reappraisal, that rate changed to 1.8716 on August the 15th, and once the hearing was completed on August the 19th, reached out to the state and the rate change to 1.8736.”

This rate will cause some people’s taxes to go up because of the reappraisals, however, some taxes we remain the same.

“What it did, it just sort of ‘micro-ed’ and each penny represents $306,000, when we first started it was going to be about $315,000, so it’s made a difference on that but we’re just trying to get it so we’re not raising taxes,” Stephenson said.

Many residents saw a huge increase when they received their appraisals, some seeing an increase as high as 60%.

“The appraised values have decreased as far as the amount originally from what came out in June, the appraised value have gone down over 11 million dollars for the reappraisal,” Bell said.

Although Bell says the appraised value has decreased in the county as a whole, some residents are still seeing high rate numbers, hoping for a potential decrease.

“What we have done in finance is again to adjust the property taxes based on what that penny brings in as far as the tax allocation, so it had some shifts in the property tax amount in each of our funds,” said Bell.

The next step for the commission is going through the audit process. New commission members will start taking office September 1.

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