Tallahassee City Commissioners have voted 3-to-2 to reduce property taxes. Commissioner Gil Ziffer led the push for the change during the last few minutes of a city budget workshop Wednesday. He says the reduction is affordable because the commission agreed to wait until 2018 to get rid of a city business license fee.
"I think we are in a position because that doesn’t actually go into effect until 2018 and because there’s some other discussions the city manager and I have had in terms of savings that I think we could go ahead and afford a tenth of a mill, which is about a million dollars decrease,” Ziffer says.
That lowers the milage rate to 4.1 mills. That’s the maximum property tax rate the commission can approve this year, but commissioner do have the opportunity to decrease the rate further. The new rate means a home with a taxable value of $100,000 would pay $410 in city property taxes. Taxable value for many homes is different from the market value.
