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Boone County property taxes expected to go up, as tax rate goes down, county official says
Northern Public Radio | By Maria Gardner Lara
Published November 21, 2024 at 4:30 AM CST
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The Boone County Board will take a vote on Thursday on the county’s budget for its 2024-2025 fiscal year. Its fiscal year starts in December.
Becky Tobin, the Boone County Administrator puts together the budget for the Boone County Board members to consider.
“The biggest thing that's included in this budget is all of our large, capital infrastructure projects that are going on,” Tobin said. “That's going to inflate the budget more than it normally would be.”
The projects include the renovation of the Public Health Department, the courthouse and two county owned buildings on McKinley Avenue ib Belvidere.
“So, there's a lot of moving parts here,” she said. “It's going to take probably 18 months to two years for all of this to be complete.”
She said there are several sources of money that will cover the cost of the projects including $6 million in reserves, federal relief funding and future bonds.
She says the county continues to pay off debt for past infrastructure projects, which will be paid off in 2028.
Regarding how these projects may affect people’s property taxes, she said “The increase that they'll see has nothing to do with these building projects.”
She said the 2025 fiscal year budget as proposed does go up.
“The board is only raising it 3.5% because that's all we need,” Tobin said. “We're not going to ask the taxpayers to pay more than the county needs to function.”
Fiscal year 2023-2024 budget was $12.8 million, while fiscal year 2024-2025 proposed budget is about $13.25 million.
She said the additional funding is going to the highway department, senior transportation program, veteran’s assistance and liability and retirement taxes.
Tobin said covering the additional expenses won’t fall on just existing property owners.
“So realistically, there's new property out there that's paying taxes, for the first time, so that your existing property owners don't get hit with as much of an increase,” she said. “And I'm not saying they're not going to see any increase, but it won't be three and a half percent from the county side.”
For fiscal year 2023-2024 the property tax rate was 0.92743. The proposed tax rate for fiscal year 2024-2025 is 0.84321, according to county documents.
She adds that although the estimated 2025 county property tax rate proposed will be down from last year, property values are expected to go up, so property owners are likely to see a tax increase.
She said folks may see additional increase from other taxing bodies like from the townships, and school districts.
