Gigabit Towns Eliminate Property Taxes

[Thailandnotes]

Well, Thomasville, Georgia, is a fascinating situation. It’s a community that I think has somewhere between 18,000 and 30,000 homes, and in—pretty rural in nature. And for the last 14 years, Thomasville, Georgia, has had fiber to the home. So it’s probably one of the longer-standing fiber-to-the-home systems. And in response to a lot of these accusations by the big companies that these systems are an abuse of taxpayer rights, or taxes are being misused, Thomasville, Georgia’s situation has been so successful that they have eliminated local property tax.

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/4...ge_the_digital

[c1ue]

Re: Gigabit Towns Eliminate Property Taxes

I'm a little unclear - how exactly did fiber to the home lead to the abolition of local property taxes?

For some of us here on iTulip, low or no property taxes is considered bad.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Gigabit Towns Eliminate Property Taxes

I wish this story was getting more press (mainstream or otherwise) Thomasville, Georgia has a population of 20,000 in a rural county of about 50,000. It began installing broadband 14 years when the telecom companies said they had a 10-year plan to get to 1.5 megabytes. The Georgia house of representatives is debating an ALEC piece of legislation that has passed in about 20 other states. It's proponents say the gist of it is “taxpayer dollars should not be used to compete against private business.” Thomasville went into the bond market for funding The debt has been repaid and after network maintenance and salaries are covered, the utility generates two million per year for the town's general fund. (part of the revenue is from leasing dark fiber) The mayor implies a major push behind the broadband build-out was retaining the local hospital which now provides services to other hospitals. It's unclear what taxes were eliminated, though I listened to a radio interview with the mayor in which he claimed property taxes have been eliminated. In my experience, most local property taxes are collected and redistributed by county, so this is confusing. No article I can find goes into any depth about Thomasville taxes or differentiates between homeowners and businesses.

2 interesting claims...the city did not hire outside people to maintain and run the network The city could not find private companies interested in helping them convert their fleet of vehicles to CNG, but are going ahead on their own.

[c1ue]

Re: Gigabit Towns Eliminate Property Taxes

Thanks for the additional info.

$2M/year is reasonable - it amounts to $40 per county resident and $100 per city resident. Considering most people pay probably $30/month for any type of internet access - and considerably more for cable - the numbers are believable.

Property taxes, however, are a completely different story.

Georgia's Dept. of Revenue page states:

https://etax.dor.ga.gov/ptd/adm/taxguide/gen/rate.aspx

The tax rate, or millage, in each county is set annually by the board of county commissioners, or other governing authority of the taxing jurisdiction, and by the Board of Education. A tax rate of one mill represents a tax liability of one dollar per $1,000 of assessed value. The average county and municipal millage rate is 30 mills; the state millage rate in each county is 0.25 mills.

Median value for property in Thomasville is a shade under $130K:

http://www.city-data.com/city/Thomasville-Georgia.html

This implies a property tax of around $400 - a figure considerably higher than the net margins noted above.

[don]

Re: Gigabit Towns Eliminate Property Taxes

This reminds me of the type of magical thinking my father would occasional dip into. On one phone conversation he told me the governor's goal was to abolish all property taxes in the state. I asked him how that revenue loss would be made up. He didn't know but thought it was a great idea nevertheless. Poor old dad.