The cumulative 6.5-cent increase in taxes means the owner of a $250,000 Wilmington home is on the hook next year for $1,131 in county taxes and $831 in city taxes – a total of $162.50 more than last year.

Council members said the city’s 11 percent tax increase looks more severe than it is. Last year, the county incorrectly included exempt properties such as schools in the tax base, leading the council to set the tax lower than it should have, in effect, giving residents a tax cut.

More than 2 cents in this year’s increase is just making up for that error, which wiped millions of dollars of anticipated revenues from the city’s balance sheet, Councilman Jim Quinn said.

“People should be satisfied that we did the best we can,” he said.

The council also chose to increase taxes to fund a $3.2 million plan to pull city salaries in line with the recommendations of a recent consultant’s report, which found Wilmington wages trailed benchmark organizations by an average of 7.2 percent.

Councilman Jason Thompson was the only member to vote against parts of the budget, which was approved in four ordinances. He said it included too many pet projects and not enough cuts.

“Don’t tell me money is the only way to solve a budget issue,” Thompson said.

In other business, council earned applause Tuesday for approving the consent agenda, usually the least contentious part of their meetings.

The vote marked the first use of electronic voting in place of voice votes. Mayor Bill Saffo said Wilmington is the first city in the state to use electronic voting, which makes it immediately apparent to the audience on television how each member voted.

http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20080617/ARTICLE/806170363/0/news06

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o fix the problem, the city needs to hire more assessors and provide better technology, the consultant said. City officials said that is already being done.

City Assessor Deborah Bunn, who was hired in January, was recently authorized to hire four new commercial real estate assessors.

“That’s a good start,” said Richard R. Almy, of Almy, Gloudemans, Jacobs and Denne, a Phoenix firm hired by the city to review commercial real estate assessments.

Commercial assessments became a hot topic more than a year ago when the Norfolk Tea Party 2, a watchdog group that has pushed for lower taxes, complained of discrepancies between assessments for some downtown office buildings and the prices they fetched when sold.

Almy said his group looked at sales versus assessments and found problems as well.

“The level of assessment was 70 to 80 percent” of what it should be, he said.

His company also studied the Virginia Beach assessor’s office last year. He said that, although he found some problems at the Beach, commercial real estate assessments there were closer to market value.

“The reason for that is simple,” he said. “Virginia Beach had more people” than Norfolk working in the assessor’s office.

Brian Smith, who heads the Norfolk Tea Party 2, said the report “confirms what we’ve been saying all along, that home-owners have been carrying an unfair burden.”

Commercial real estate provides a small percentage of the estimated $203 million in real estate taxes the city will collect in the fiscal year that begins on July 1. Bunn said figures on how much commercial real estate will generate weren’t immediately available.

“It’s unfortunate we’ve lost the revenue we could have gotten the last few years from commercial real estate,” Councilman W. Randy Wright said. “The good thing is that we’re fixing the problem.”

Almy said computing assessments for commercial properties is more difficult than for residential, which is based on sales. Many commercial assessments are based on business income, and for that, the city must rely on businesses to honestly report income data.

Mayor Paul Fraim said the city has asked Attorney General Bob McDonnell whether it can require businesses to turn over federal tax return information.

http://hamptonroads.com/2008/06/norfolk-council-says-city-losing-millions-commercial-taxes

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