Tax revenue history

In the process of writing up my thoughts following the tax workshop I have been delving into the property tax data that is available looking for ways to best put taxes into perspective. At the workshop the focus was mostly on individual taxpayers and this fiscal year tax changes, but it is useful to also consider the historical record. Real property taxes pay for most of what county government does so every year the total revenue needs to cover the budget ups and downs, or we have to borrow of dig into reserves to make up the difference.

It is important to keep clearly in mind that tax rates (historical data) and tax revenues are different. The following is all about the revenue which is essentially assessed valuation times the tax rate, and in the case of residential property a number of exemptions and other relief are available to taxpayers. Simply put, the idea is that a $10M hotel will pay half what a $20M hotel pays, both at the same tax rate.

The following graph shows the money the county collects from each class of real property. County tax revenue tripled from 1999 to 2008, and now has returned to those levels, over $100M per year. Note that after the 2008 crash everything goes down (they did not raise the tax rates significantly) and is just now back up to earlier peak levels.

Relevant to the recent homeowner property tax uproar, note that the Homestead tax revenues as a whole have decreased: in fact, it is the only classification that got a break while all the others a sharply up the past couple of years. Yet a lot of homeowners are unhappy about large tax increases - this strongly suggests that many people (who we are not hearing from) saw taxes go down this year, and others (unless they are making all this up) had taxes go way up.

I don't have the data (yet) to do a proper analysis but this actual matches what the administration and council members supporting the recent tax code change are saying - that the tax cap that pegged taxes to modest growth from whatever the tax was many years ago had given some people a big break for all these years. We need more data to say more than this, but the pieces do fit together, though in not the way one would expect at first.

Tax revenue historical data

In compiling this data one number I thought was a mistake, but it seems to check at least the source documents I have from the county clerk. You can see by scanning the table at the bottom here that year to year the revenue numbers generally grow year to year until about 2009, then the drop down and come back up … except for Agriculture and Conservation which are currently at 2001 levels or below. The following chart that shows revenue by classification as a percentage of revenue shows it most clearly.

The chart above roughly groups taxes by who pays. This is an arbitrary choice but I think it makes sense and simplifies the view: if you want to look by classification the interpretation is not that different.

• Homeowners is Homestead and residential
• Business is Commercial and Industrial
• Visitors is Hotel/Resort and Vacation Rental (taxes are passed through as rent)
• and the rest are by single classification, Agriculture and Conservation

Over a decade ago homeowners and visitors each paid for about a third of county revenues with business and agriculture sharing the rest. (Conservation is only a few percent throughout.) Later on visitors got a break as homeowners roughly took up the slack and in recent years those revenues equalled out now at over 40% each. Business contribution to county revenue has slowly dropped over the years - but I would think that if anything there is a lot more business activity now, isn't there?

Ag gets a big tax break

Even more curiously - and this I would really like to understand better - last year agriculture revenues dropped percipitously (very good news for agricultural land owners) from $12.8M in aggregate (2012) to just $4.6M (2013). Since the agriculture tax rate increased over 20% that year there must have been a massive change in assessed value. What suddenly devalued all the agricultural land on the island in the last couple of years? Hotel/resort revenue bumped up somewhat but taxpayers and visitors mostly picked up the tab for agriculture anyway you look at it.

Here are the numbers for fiscal year 2012 (from Resolution 2012-30, Draft 1) compared to fiscal year 2013 (Resolution 2013-41) for ag tax class. Note that in 2013 they stopped breaking out assessment by land and building separately so comparing combined total assessed valuations from both years.

• 2012 ag $2,131,745,065 ($715,691,447 building and $1,416,053,618 land)
• 2013 ag $ 688,437,700

UPDATE: Still looking into the details but the word from the county is that in 2012 a lot of "gentleman's estates" were shifted from agriculture zoning to residential. In principle that sounds reasonable - large homes on many acres of grass with a long coconut lined driveway that aren't farms at all - but I need to research to say anything more. The graph above does bear this out with Ag's sharp drop 2012-2013 matched by Residential heading up at about the same angle that Ag is down. However, the thing is that Ag rate is $1 lower than Residential, so this lowered taxes for the presumably wealthy who live on properties large enough to be zoned agriculture. 

The numbers

Here is that tax revenue, hand compiled going back to 1999, in thousands of dollars.

Fiscal year	Home-stead	Resi-dential	Vac Rental/ Apartment	Hotel/ Resort	Commer-cial	Indust-rial	Ag	Conser-vation	TOTAL
1999	$4,555	$8,189	$4,572	$7,712	$3,731	$1,423	$3,494	$805	$34,481
2000	$4,776	$8,070	$4,786	$8,404	$3,706	$1,445	$4,634	$800	$36,621
2001	$4,868	$8,261	$4,770	$9,022	$3,762	$1,441	$5,120	$815	$38,059
2002	$5,398	$9,227	$5,163	$9,224	$3,695	$1,445	$6,455	$1,127	$41,734
2003	$5,635	$10,258	$6,529	$10,283	$3,942	$1,585	$8,074	$1,223	$47,529
2004	$7,502	$12,250	$8,634	$10,682	$4,667	$1,661	$9,400	$1,262	$56,058
2005	$13,633	$15,529	$11,746	$12,234	$6,529	$2,153	$11,912	$1,502	$75,238
2006	$18,476	$19,480	$12,581	$14,097	$6,812	$2,209	$14,602	$1,764	$90,021
2007	$20,489	$21,736	$15,600	$15,321	$7,181	$2,405	$16,174	$1,805	$100,711
2008	$19,855	$22,367	$15,571	$17,198	$7,675	$2,350	$16,169	$2,326	$103,511
2009	$18,289	$21,640	$16,152	$17,578	$7,882	$2,473	$14,750	$2,021	$100,785
2010	$15,541	$19,739	$13,369	$15,383	$7,726	$2,575	$12,831	$1,796	$88,960
2011	$14,010	$18,405	$12,995	$14,947	$7,237	$2,488	$12,559	$1,749	$84,390
2012	$10,585	$20,911	$12,530	$14,945	$7,115	$2,523	$12,812	$1,677	$83,098
2013	$12,241	$30,068	$19,246	$17,741	$7,699	$2,762	$4,647	$616	$95,020
2014	$10,642	$33,737	$23,242	$23,348	$7,977	$2,785	$5,151	$509	$107,391