Missoula City Council Lowers Tax Increase
The Missoula City Council received their taxable value numbers from the Department of Revenue this week and some good news came from the report back.
"Department of Revenue's job is to certify our tax base. Part of that tax base is the value of new construction. We get new tax revenues without a mill levy increase. For this year, we received a value that was higher than we anticipated in our original budget," Missoula’s Chief Administrative Officer Dale Bickel said. "We had estimated about $345,000 in new revenue from tax base growth and the numbers came in at about $452,000."
Bickell said this is great news because now city council can reduce the amount of levies that were originally planned during the budget process. Furthermore, instead of a 5.7 percent tax increase that was previously projected for the next fiscal year, Missoulians could see a lower projection of 4.7 percent instead.
"While it is positive, we are only at half of the growth that we had seen prior to the recession," Bickell said. "If we continue to see the development level of activity we've seen before, it'll certainly help out a lot in being able to keep our tax levels down."
Click here to see development figures for FY2015 compared with FY2014.