Jacksonville: Value per acre analysis

[fsu813]

Hi All.

Thought this is something you may be interested in. A Zoom presentation on Jacksonville's taxable value per acre analysis, by Kevin O' Halloran. It's being hosted by ULI, register here:
https://northflorida.uli.org/events/detail/56F1B38D-A839-47DA-B873-2D000E1F5F4A/

Kevin's a super sharp guy, in grad school at Georgetown now, previously attended UNF and worked at SPAR (in Springfield).

[Captain Zissou]

I'm planning to attend.

[fsu813]

How'd it go? Thoughts? Usefulness?

[marcuscnelson]

Isn't it next week? The 25th?

[Captain Zissou]

It must have been rescheduled.  I thought I saw it say the 18th in a number of places, but it's now the 25th.  It has a decent number of attendees who have RSVP'd.

[Captain Zissou]

The presentation was great.  The concepts were something that all of us here are familiar with, but to see the numbers behind it was very interesting.  Should be required viewing for anyone controlling the city's purse strings.

Presentation can be found here (I couldn't open it in explorer. Works in chrome):  https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/30c4dc34c5204da28af6f337eaf7e708

[Peter Griffin]

The more tightly you stuff people into an area, the more property tax you can pilfer off them.

It's no wonder why people move to the suburbs (where a lot of times CDD's cover the costs of infrastructure development)

[jcjohnpaint]

Amazing!
Thanks for posting

[CityLife]

I stopped skimming the paper it immediately after the parcel level examples on page 17.

He tries to make a comparison of taxable value in Mandarin with an in-town neighborhood in Moncrief, but only uses one property for each neighborhood. The taxable value of the Mandarin home is $104k, but he used a complete outlier on the block and in Mandarin in general. Just to fact check it, the average taxable value on the street he used is actually $157k. The average taxable value of single family homes in Mandarin is likely north of $200k

The taxable value of the home he used on Moncrief was $69k. However, the average taxable value of homes on the block near the home he used is about $20k, but he somehow picked an outlier with a taxable value of $69k. I clicked on 20+ houses near the intersection he used and couldn't find one that was even close to being over $50k.

I feel bad mentioning this publicly, but if you are going to try to use something to influence public policy and perception, you simply cannot manipulate data like that. The GIS maps look very nice and I'm sure there is a lot of interesting information in the paper, but I simply can't trust any analysis after such a flawed use of data to prove a point...

[Peter Griffin]

The taxable value of the Mandarin home is $104k, but he used a complete outlier on the block and in Mandarin in general. Just to fact check it, the average taxable value on the street he used is actually $157k. The average taxable value of single family homes in Mandarin is likely north of $200k

The taxable value of the home he used on Moncrief was $69k. However, the average taxable value of homes on the block near the home he used is about $20k, but he somehow picked an outlier with a taxable value of $69k. I clicked on 20+ houses near the intersection he used and couldn't find one that was even close to being over $50k.

Nice legwork, good on you for trying to verify the data. Manipulated data sets with conclusions that are inline with the narrative are all around us these days, never know where or how innocuous of a study will be manipulated in such a way and repeated or referenced ad-nauseum with no verification attempted.

We're in a bit of a replication crisis these days, sad state of affairs

[bl8jaxnative]

I stopped skimming the paper it immediately after the parcel level examples on page 17.

He tries to make a comparison of taxable value in Mandarin with an in-town neighborhood in Moncrief, but only uses one property for each neighborhood. The taxable value of the Mandarin home is $104k, but he used a complete outlier on the block and in Mandarin in general. Just to fact check it, the average taxable value on the street he used is actually $157k. The average taxable value of single family homes in Mandarin is likely north of $200k

The taxable value of the home he used on Moncrief was $69k. However, the average taxable value of homes on the block near the home he used is about $20k, but he somehow picked an outlier with a taxable value of $69k. I clicked on 20+ houses near the intersection he used and couldn't find one that was even close to being over $50k.

I feel bad mentioning this publicly, but if you are going to try to use something to influence public policy and perception, you simply cannot manipulate data like that. The GIS maps look very nice and I'm sure there is a lot of interesting information in the paper, but I simply can't trust any analysis after such a flawed use of data to prove a point...

It's even worse.  Only half the city's revenues are from property taxes.

[Peter Griffin]

It's even worse.  Only half the city's revenues are from property taxes.

Sales tax I know of, but what other sources are the major contributors to the city's revenue?

[jaxlongtimer]

^ Fees from permits, occupational licenses, garbage. storm-water, etc.  Traffic and code fines.  Cuts of City owned parking lot charges and facility ticket sales.  JEA makes a major contribution.  Grants/funding/reimbursements from State and Federal agencies.  Taxes on utilities such as cable, phone, JEA bills, etc. and hotel bills.

Comes down to how creative they can be and how hard they want to hide the real costs of running the City  .

Lot's of times they say they haven't raised taxes while raising fees instead.  It's really just semantics.  Of course, fees are usually regressive so it burdens the poor the most when fees are raised over, say, property taxes.   

Bottom line:  They are going to get the revenue one way or the other up to some point.  I believe if we had more dedicated streams of revenue like the recently passed "school improvement" sales tax, voters would be much more supportive of increased taxes.  It's clear voters don't like politico's having the ability to reallocate funds to their pet projects and favored money supporters and, thus, much of the distrust of general taxes.

[Charles Hunter]

From the COJ website ( https://www.coj.net/departments/finance/budget.aspx - FY20-21 Budget Summary document) Property Tax is the biggest source at about 55% in the current year budget

$741m  55%  Property Tax
$164m  12%  State Shared Revenue
$130m  10%  Other taxes
$130m  10%  Transfers from Component Units
$100m    7%  Permits, Fees, Charges for Services
$  77m    6%  All Other Sources

$1,341m  Total

[fieldafm]

It's even worse.  Only half the city's revenues are from property taxes.

Sales tax I know of, but what other sources are the major contributors to the city's revenue?

Roughly two-thirds of the City's revenue comes from either property taxes and revenue from JEA (which doesn't pay property taxes... effectively the tradeoff between a municipally-owned utility versus franchise fees and property taxes paid by a privately-run utility provider).

Much of what bl8jaxnative posts is off-the-cuff rants. Heavy drinking while using the internet is an odd combination.