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Was there Confusion or Transparency with the Tax Rate Increase on the Website?

Update 09-15-2022: The City has corrected the potentially confusing information referred to in this article.

Within hours after this article was publicly available, the official city website was edited in order to eliminate the confusion that had been discussed in it. Note that the misleading naming of the individual documents I discussed in the video has not been addressed. CLICK Here for the link the City added. 

In any event, I applaud the City staff’s quick action attempting to make things more identifiable and increase the accuracy and resulting usefulness and transparency of the City’s website.

The fact remains, however, that “you can’t unring a bell”. The decision that the City Council made to raise taxes so drastically appears to have occurred over a backdrop of public confusion as to exactly what the true numbers were and without the public being able to fully identify the information they needed prior to the adoption of the new tax rate.

Here is the original article. References and Recording was as of 09-14-2022

While reviewing our city website, I realized that there was no direct link to any of the tax information to make finding it easy for website visitors. In fact, wile the tax information is online, it is somewhat buried and likely confusing to an average taxpayer. 

The attached video demonstrates that the City has not been altogether forthcoming regarding their presentation of our current tax rate increase and other issues.

Has anyone even seen the proposed budget for FY 2022-2023 on the city website? I couldn’t find it.

This is just one of a number of issues that this video presents for your consideration. Please take the time to watch it. It is really rather eye-opening.

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