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So, I've been researching Albuquerque as a place to move in approximately 2 years if not sooner. The books I've read indicate that the property taxes are pretty low $1500 to $3000. ( the books are somewhat dated) However, when I look at Realty sites it looks like the taxes have sigfinicantly increased. My question is have the propery taxes increased and if so what if any government projects or services have the residence seen to justify the increase.
Worry less about property taxes than bond issues. I didn't pay enough attention to
the outrageous use of bonds to take public debt off the visible tax burden and hide
/ disguise outlays.
Since these are a county by county as well as city by city debt, the amount you
will be responsible for can change significantly from neighborhood to neighborhood
as well as from year to year.
I'm not aware of any central, on-line source for a listing of all bond amounts but perhaps
others can help?
Property tax is a percentage of home value, so the $1500 - $3000 number is sort of meaningless. It may the be for the 'average' home, but if you buy a $500,000 house it is going to be very different.
Also there is a big discrepancy in that your property value can't increase more than 3% each year, however, once you sell it it jumps up to the value paid for it. This has cause huge differences between properties and I believe in Bernalilio county they will be resetting them back to the lower of current market value or +3% since its value in 200? (4 maybe?). So people who bought their house recently may see their taxes go down, not because the tax rate changes, but because the assessed value of their house goes down.
So here is the calculation. Take the value of the house and divide by 3. Then subtract $2000. (There are more exemptions for veterans and such, but I don't know the values).
Then multiply by the percentage of taxes, which in Albuquerque is 4.0252%
Example:
You buy a 240K house. 240K/3 = 80K. 80K - 2K = 78K.
78K * .040252 = 3.14K
So you will pay about $3140 a year in taxes. Now if you catch the 3% cap your property value might not actually be what you paid for it, but who know what will really happen it is sort of a mess right now.
You can go to the county website Bernalillo County Public Access (http://www.bernco.gov/property/default.asp?qpaction=search_form&type=situs - broken link)
and do a search for any property in the county and look at their current tax bill. This will have the percent they pay in taxes for that location. It should be the same for all of Albuquerque, but will vary between cities, unincorporated areas and other counties. Don't know if the other counties have a similar website or not.
To be safe don't assume that what they are paying is what you will be paying, do the math with the purchase price of the home.
Some more information since I gave a bunch of info, but I didn't really answer your question that well (and I was curious myself). Turns out I wasn't able to quickly find out what bonds and such make up the percentage of the different taxes, might take more digging, but for comparison stake in 2001 the original tax rate was 3.8589%, in 2005 it was 3.8189% and in 2009 its 4.0252%. Many of the rates have gone down slightly since 2001, but the city has gone up a bit and the public schools have contributed the most to the increase (~.202% increase since 2001).
I wasn't able to make nice table to show off all the numbers in this editor, but if you want to see them the county website has all the numbers back to 2001.
Also since you probably don't know, APS = Albuquerque public Schools, CNM is our community college, UNMH is the University of New Mexico Hospital and AMAFCA is the Albuquerque Metro Area flood control authority.
So the property taxes haven't gone up much in the last decade (.2% of 33% of the value of your house), so on a $200k house they have increase roughly $130/year and that has pretty much all gone to the money pit that is our public schools.
That said if you are looking at taxes I believe the GRT has increased quite a bit since 2000 or so. 7% vs 5.8%? Something in that neighborhood.
No if they upped it to 50% only 56% would graduate because all the students would be too busy trying out for all the sports teams so they could play at the fancy new stadiums we so desperately need.
...they will be resetting them back to the lower of current market value or +3% since its value in 200? (4 maybe?). So people who bought their house recently may see their taxes go down, not because the tax rate changes, but because the assessed value of their house goes down.
Ralthor, have they *definitely* decided on this course of action? The city is currently in a bind, because there's no "easy" way to address the lightning tax issue.
If they do go the route you suggest, they're going to have some serious budget shortfalls in the property tax area. Because legally they'll still be tied to the 3% annual limit for prior assessment increases, my guess is they will increase the 4% rate significantly (for everyone) to make up the difference.
I believe so, at the beginning of the year the 3% cap was declared unconstitutional (age discrimination maybe cant remember exactly) in Bernalillo county. Because of this the assessor (Karen Montoya) decided her only course of action was to roll back all the property values and add 3% each year so everyone is on equal footing. As of right now this is what is going to happen, although I suppose it could change if the appeals court rules that it is constitutional.
My bet is that even if it is ruled constitutional by an appeals court sometime this year everything will still rollback and stay that way. Karen Montoya is up for re election so it would look bad (and right now she looks good taking charge and implementing this). I assume they are already well into the process of calculating the rollbacks and it will probably be to difficult to try and change how they are going to do it now. Even if the appeals court ruled it constitutional, then it would go to the NM supreme court (or whatever the next court is) which could decide its unconstitutional again and they would have to do it anyways next year (or lawmakers might fix it themselves and they would have to do it next year anyways).
It will be quite a hit for the city and county and APS, not sure what they are going do. If they lose $500 - $1000 from 40,000 residences...thats a lot of money.
Here is a recent article I found, just skimmed parts of it real quick and it looks like all this is still true.
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