Officials seek tax-collection bump of 2.9%

Residents of Pulaski County can get property-levy e-bills

The Pulaski County treasurer’s office will seek $447 million in property taxes this year, up 2.9 percent from the collections sought in 2013.

This year also will be the first year residents can sign up for electronic billing and payment reminders through the treasurer’s website, which has accepted electronic payments for a few years.

The treasurer’s office will start mailing tax bills based on 2013 property next week, but on Tuesday, 64,500 Pulaski County residents will receive emails telling them they can pay their taxes online, Chief Deputy Treasurer Bentley Hovis said.

Two-thirds of the tax funds, about $300 million, will go to the Little Rock, North Little Rock and Pulaski County Special school districts, and about $60.2 million will go to the general funds for the county and cities.

About $19.2 million will go to the Central Arkansas Library System and other libraries, and $19.5 million will go to road funds for the county and cities. About $4 million will be funneled to the Arkansas Children’s Hospital through Pulaski County, and Little Rock, North Little Rock and Maumelle will spend several million dollars on pensions for police and fire workers.

The increase in collections this year is the biggest year-to-year jump in property-tax bills in the past five years, according to county data. In 2010, the county sought $407 million.

“New construction is really beginning to pick up,” said Joe Thompson, chief assessment administrator with the county assessor’s office. “The central Arkansas economy is really starting to be healthy.”

Thompson said past years did not have as much new construction because of the recession, but this year the county was back to a healthy 3 percent to 4 percent increase.

Thompson said the increase in property taxes sought is half due to new construction and half to an increase per Amendment 79 in the billable amount of property values that rose with the 2012 reassessment.

Amendment 79 says, among other things, that after reappraisals that occur every three years, residents’ tax bills cannot rise more than 5 percent on real estate or 10 percent for other property. There’s no bottom for how much property values or tax bills can drop. But values rise up to 5 percent or 10 percent each year on higher-valued properties un-til the new value is reached or another assessment occurs.

All property is taxed at 20 percent of its assessed value, and that amount is multiplied by the millage rate to determine how much is actually collected in tax dollars.

Most of the money in Pulaski County goes toward schools, although the amount varies slightly in the county’s eight cities and the unincorporated area, which levy different millage rates.

The average property tax millage in Pulaski County was 58.5 in 2013, or $58.50 per $1,000 of value. A mill is one-tenth of a cent.

When the treasurer’s office mails out bills, residents will find the amount due and instructions to sign up for electronic billing for next year in lieu of paper bills mailed out each February.

In addition to mortgage companies, 261 Pulaski County residents who participated in an e-billing trial with the treasurer’s office last year will get electronic bills after opting for them this year, Hovis said.

Residents will be told to go to the treasurer’s website - pulaskicountytreasurer.net - click on the link to pay their bills and from there will be able to sign up for e-billing.

To sign up, a resident must create a profile on the treasurer’s website per the instructions, providing an address and email address. Those who sign up for the program also will receive reminders to make payment installments they might have opted for instead of paying bills at once.

Pulaski County is one of two Arkansas counties working one-billing, said Sue Liles, White County treasurer and president of the Arkansas County Tax Collectors Association. Saline County already has 3,000 people signed up to do its first round of e-billing this year, county tax collector Joy Ballard said.

Saline County has 35,000 email addresses for residents who will receive e-statements Feb. 25, but those who did not opt for e-billing only still will get paper bills at an expense of $0.56 to the county per tax bill, Ballard said. Saline County plans to send out about 67,000 bills in all, including the 3,000 e-statements.

Pulaski County only has about 70,000 email addresses for its 280,000-plus tax bills, and Hovis said each bill costs the county about $1.20 to mail out, when factoring in how many tax bills will eventually need to be sent extra times for delinquent billing.

Pulaski County also includes coupons, three envelopes for installment payments and other materials that fill up the envelopes, Hovis said.

The cost of e-billing has been $45,000 for four new servers, quadrupling the treasurer’s website’s capacity from 64 gigabytes to 256 gigabytes, Hovis said.

The treasurer’s office also beefed up the site’s bandwidth from 3 megabits per second to 10 megabits per second.

The expansions are intended to help the treasurer’s office handle the extra data from county residents and the influx of people paying their taxes online as soon as they’re notified of their bills, Hovis said.

“We learned a lesson last year,” he said. In 2013, the treasurer’s office had more than 50,000 county resident email addresses and emailed them all at once when their tax bills were online. The action “initiated so much traffic, it about took our system under,” Hovis said.

“It taught us that we didn’t need a garden hose, we needed a fire hose,” Hovis said information technology workers told him.

In 2012, server issues prevented Pulaski County residents from paying their taxes on the final collection day, which is Oct. 15 each year.

In 2013, Treasurer Debra Buckner said the issue wouldn’t happen again because the county had a better software provider, called Tax Pro.

Last year, the county collected $418 million, which was 97 percent of the $434 million in taxes sought, Hovis said.

Arkansas, Pages 7 on 02/17/2014

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