In the letter, Felán states that Rep. Nevárez “makes a good suggestion to simply fix the problem and move forward as early as next week by the County voting to reduce the total property tax rate to the Rollback Tax Rate ADJUSTED for sales tax of .456839 as calculated in the Tax Rate Worksheet by the Tax Assessor Collector’s Office on September 16, 2016.”
“By doing so, the County would avoid spending on a Tax Rate Rollback Election that would be better spent on services for citizens and would lock in about $900,000 more in Total Maintenance & Operations tax revenue than last year to pay the current Road & Bridge Fund and General Fund expenses; a $900,000 Total M&O tax revenue increase could lock in the $60,000 increase to the Nutrition Fund over last year’s budget; $30,000 increase to the Food Pantry over last year; $300,000 increase to the Sheriff’s Department over last year, and still leave about $510,000 available to pay for increases to Road & Bridge Fund expenses, community centers or other areas,” wrote Felán.
Felán further stated that the vote would allow for taxpayers to begin requesting refunds for property taxes saved by the county.
“The County can continue wasting taxpayer resources trying to mislead the community that the Court’s September 29, 2016 decision to violate and attempt to game state law to opportunistically force a 38% Total M&O tax revenue increase (at .542309) down taxpayers throats was justified. In the end though it’s better to deal with the reality now that some department or agency at the State of Texas will eventually see this ‘we already fixed it’ act for what it is considering new state laws are being violated by the County the longer this on (most recently the Texas Election Code),” wrote Felán. “The Court may have made it’s budgeting job slightly more difficult by not taking responsibility for its decision over the last four months, but it will only get increasingly difficult the longer the County tries to pretend that it has tax revenues that it never had the right to collect.”