The council amended the existing taxation rate by changing the exemption from $100,000 to $113,000.
Mayor Bobby Warren said the exemption rate for those age 65 and older has doubled since 2019, from $50,000 to $100,000 maximum deduction.
In May, council members and city management discussed the possible increases to the homestead exemption. Officials said the city would see a reduction in revenue of about $33,000 per $5,000 increase in the exemption. That equates to approximately $37 in savings for the average homeowner over age 65, City Manager Austin Bleess said.
“Given the increase in cost for this upcoming fiscal year, adding more firefighters and the other major projects we have coming up as well, the council must weigh the full needs of that community as well,” Bleess said.
Additionally, officials discussed the difficulty of simultaneously having to consider major infrastructure improvement costs, which have tripled in recent decades, and providing additional tax relief for elderly citizens in the new budget.
“You quickly learn when you start having to ... create a budget and fund it with the various forms of revenue that we have available, you quickly discover that these things are much more complex sometimes than you realize,” Warren said. “One of the challenges that we have is that at the end of the day ... our goal is to create as fair a system as we can under the current circumstance. ... I think it makes it extremely challenging to tax everyone on a fair basis.”
