Hold on to your wallets, it’s that time of year again when the Board of Supervisors unravel, explore, and discern the mysteries of setting the Fiscal Year 2025/2026 Pima County budget.
It seems the deeper one mines into the budget, the more cryptic, or should I say, puzzling it becomes. Each Supervisor has a favorite area of taxpayer-funded special interest, or in my case as it seems more and more, NOT special interest.
Since the start of COVID, we have witnessed the definition of mission creep by the Board, with the creation of programs that enter into areas that are technically not in the Supervisors’ lane.
One such program is the Pima Early Education Program scholarships, marketed as PEEPs, which the board majority kick-started with $30.2 Million of American Rescue Plan Act funds. PEEPs purpose is to provide a limited number of somewhat income-challenged families with pre-kindergarten school aged children free school district preschool classes, Quality First scholarships, and extended-day Head Start programming.
More succinctly, this program amounts to enhanced day-care for a relatively small number of beneficiaries. Historically, state government directed and paid for public education, but enabling legislation passed in 2021 allows counties to use library district taxes for this purpose. So far, Pima County is the only county to take the state up on this voluntary cost shift, and that is why you will see on your property tax bill an increase for the library district.
Then there is the litany of COVID-era health related mandates, ranging from eviction and emergency sheltering programs to providing the accommodation and travel of “newcomers”. The pandemic is over, and has been for several years, yet many of the programs and their employees remain in place and effect, now institutionalized.
While the County is still assessing and monitoring the impact of potential grant reductions and/or elimination by the federal government, we have the introduction of a Supervisor proposed taxpayer-funded initiative, historically provided by cities or towns, messaged under the deceptive misnomer of “Affordable Housing”.
Affordable housing, to most of us means a house you can afford to buy – where one saves money for a down payment and procures a mortgage from a private lender to purchase a single family home. Then, with the discipline of paying mortgage payments over years and maintaining the purchased property, owners benefit from the equity accrued in the property and can use it to purchase a newer or bigger property, or utilize the appreciated value of the property in a number of ways to provide a savings/nest egg in the owner’s later years.
Unfortunately, many free and clear homeowners are increasingly finding themselves to be tenants of Pima County because property taxes are levied continuously and must be paid annually, thus creating a significant financial challenge. And, like every landlord, the County can take your home from you if those property taxes are not paid.
Herein lies the problem of definition of affordable housing by my colleagues. They consider taxpayer-funded rental units inhabited by taxpayer-subsidized tenants, nee public housing, as “affordable housing”.
Pima County taxpayers are penalized on both ends of this scheme. They will be funding loans to developers (often out of state) to build rent-controlled housing for subsidized tenants – all via increased property taxes.
Imagine retired senior residents living on fixed incomes, opening their annual tax bills and discovering that their property taxes have gone up shockingly, only to further find out that the reason for such tax increases is to pay for somebody else’s rent, while the street in front of their home crumbles.
This plan proposed by one of my colleagues, and apparently supported by the other three, originally called for a primary property tax increase of three cents per $100 of assessed value, and has been now modified to start with a smaller initial amount, which then graduates to a larger increase over the ten year life of the plan. Allegedly, this taxation would raise $225 Million in the next decade, all directed and intended for “affordable housing”.
Stopping this effort by my colleagues will be next to impossible, not only because of their super-majority, but also because of their ideology. A sterling example of this was stated by a fellow Supervisor during a Board meeting in May, who said that funding public housing through raising property taxes was the most “progressive” way because, “it takes (money) from those who can afford it the most and gives (money) to those who can afford it the least.
It’s troubling that my colleagues are so fervent about spending money on programs that are not our jurisdictional responsibility, and none of them cares about where the money is coming from – all Pima County taxpayers, our community’s home and business owners who have being doing more with less every day are not being taxed too little, my colleagues are spending too much – and not on our core mandates, like fixing our roads.
The bottom line is that it is not a matter of if your property taxes will be going up; it is only a matter of by how much, and now you know why.
Pima County Supervisor Steve Christy, District 4
33 N. Stone Avenue, Floor 11
Tucson, AZ 85701
520-724-8094
district4@pima.gov
