Stan Geiger

Property Tax: The Ever-Growing Tax

An astute reader did a little research into where Tulsa County property tax money goes and posted a comment on my immediately-preceding piece. I thought I would reprint some excerpts and expand a bit.

The commenter says:

The City of Tulsa gets about $35M. TCC, by itself, got just short of $30M.

Why does Tulsa have crappy streets? Well gee, maybe it's because we give too much tax money to a freakin' junior college.

Thirty million bucks over 10 years is $300 million. That could put a dent in a street problem, don't you think?

Their current proposals would raise the millages by about 50%, from the current 7.2 to over 12 mills, when both the bond issue and the permanent assessment are included.

To me, that says TCC, by itself, would receive about $45M based upon the 06-07 listing, more than even Tulsa County received, and about 40% of what is given the entire Tulsa Public School system.

Enough isn't ever enough, and this just proves the theory.

Educators can never get enough. Now there's a point I've been arguing for over a decade. I'm glad to see other folks are getting up to speed.

I worked in an administrative office at TCC's Metro Campus for a couple of years in the mid '90s. I had been fed a steady diet of money-starved education for years---just like everybody else. Working in that biz gave me an up-close and personal look. I quickly came to the conclusion that all I had been told was BS.

Those downtrodden, overworked, underpaid instructors were putting in 3 hours a day in a classroom. Then they had lunch and did a couple of hours of so-called "office hours," during which they would drink coffee and read a newspaper. Then they went home. This, of course, was what happened on the fairly rare occasions when they actually had to show up at all.

Another thing I noticed was you couldn't throw a cat through the building without hitting some kind of administrator.

I could go on, and on, and on, and on some more. But for now, I would like to focus on the more than $30 million per year in property tax money that is currently flowing to TCC.

Back in the day, I took it upon myself to do a study of TCC finances. Budgets were on file in the library. So I took a look at 5 consecutive years, from fiscal year 1993 through fiscal year 1997.

In 1997, TCC's budget figures showed property tax revenue of $15.3 million. Reports say the last permanent millage increase voted to TCC came in 1994. So in a 10-year span of time, in the absence of any increase in the tax rate, the amount of property tax revenue flowing into TCC doubled.

The property tax is not a static tax. It grows. If you vote an increase today, whatever it is, 50 bucks, a hundred bucks or whatever, it will be a bigger tax increase next year, and the year after that and the year after that.

Do you want to do yourself and your family harm so a school that already consumes more tax money than it should be consuming can have more?

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