St. Louis County Executive Sam Page is asking the St. Louis County Council to raise the county’s property tax rate this year. Local governments have authority to make small changes in rates without a vote of the people, and Page claims this is needed to avoid cuts to county services. (The power to adjust rates without a vote is legitimate enough when it’s used for small, short-term changes. Town & Country shows how it can be abused.)
While the cuts might come in multiple areas, there seems to be consensus that the potential cuts would be focused on the county police department, since that is the largest general budget item. (In most other counties, we would be referring to it as the sheriff’s department.) As the council’s budget coordinator said, “There is no scenario in which you don’t cut the police.”
But here is the tricky part. Within a state or within a city, services are spread out within the entire state or city. MoDOT serves transportation needs throughout Missouri. The Kansas City Fire Department serves all of Kansas City. But within counties, some services are countywide, but many other services are focused on the unincorporated parts of the county, even though most taxes are countywide. So what you have here is a proposed property tax increase on all one million people of St. Louis County that will primarily fund police officers who mostly serve the 300,000 people of unincorporated St. Louis County.
Why would a resident of Brentwood want to pay higher taxes for police who don’t serve Brentwood? Brentwood has its own police to pay for. (Note: I am well aware that the county police contract to provide policing in some cities, such as Wildwood, but those cities pay for that service directly out of city revenues, not out of general county taxes.)
There are services in Missouri counties that are countywide, meaning that you get the same service whether you live in a municipality or not. These include public health, most revenue offices (collector, assessor, recorder of deeds, etc.), and parks and recreation (counties operate parks inside and outside of cities). Some county services are only for the unincorporated areas. For example, regulations of county planning and zoning departments don’t apply within municipalities. Some departments serve both cities and unincorporated areas but in different ways. A county road department will maintain arterial roads that serve everyone, but also the neighborhood streets in an unincorporated subdivision.
These differences also vary by county. For a rural county with only a few small towns in it that provide limited services, the county will be the dominant provider of local government and county taxes will serve everyone more or less equally. For a large urban county that is almost entirely composed of cities and towns, such as Jackson and Clay counties, the various municipalities are the dominant provider of local services and the portion of county taxes that go to the unincorporated parts tends to be small. St. Louis County is the largest county in the state and while it has many municipalities, it also has a very large unincorporated population, which creates a difficult tax situation.
St. Louis County residents just rejected a countywide use tax. Sam Page wants a countywide property tax increase. In my opinion, the county council is unlikely to agree to it. Is there an option that would allow county taxes to be raised but have it fall mostly on the county residents who receive the services?
Yes, there is. The utility tax (also called a franchise tax or a gross receipts tax) is simply a sales tax on your utility bill. There is a special law for St. Louis County that imposes the tax only in unincorporated areas. (It also applies to Jackson County, but I don’t think it has been enacted there.) Residents of St. Louis County pay a five percent tax on their utility bills. If the county executive and county council truly believe that revenue increases are necessary to fund county police (and I am not saying they are) then the county should propose a franchise tax increase. That would impact the taxes paid and the services received by residents of unincorporated St. Louis County, and I think that would be the fairest and efficient approach.
