By MELINDA J. OVERSTREET
for Glasgow News 1
City residents and others who own property here may have a lower rate on their 2025 property tax bills, but members of the Glasgow Common Council Finance Committee want those individuals and companies to understand why that doesn’t necessarily mean a lower overall bill, because the value of the property also impacts the total amount.
The committee needed to have a special-called meeting this week to discuss the proposed rates, because those rates must advertised for a certain amount of time before the council votes on the first reading of the ordinance establishing the rate, explained Mayor Henry Royse, who is among the nonvoting members of the group, along with other key city personnel, like the city treasurer.
That person, Victoria Simmons, walked the council members who are the panel’s voting members, three of four of whom were present, through the summary sheet for the suggested plan, but not before Councilman Terry Bunnell, who chairs the group, called their attention to the fact that $2.15 million is what is budgeted as the anticipated revenue from property taxes for the fiscal year that began July 1.
The current rates for real property and personal property are the same, and Simmons recommended they continue to be done that way. The rates for motor vehicles and watercraft are established separately, and the recommendation for those is to keep them the same as last year’s.
The 2024 rate for both real and personal property was 0.169, or 16.9 cents, per $100 of assessed value of the property, and the total revenue received from those tax bills, as of April 2025, was $2,031,528.
The compensating rate – the one that would be expected to produce roughly the same or close to the amount of revenue as the prior year – is calculated by the Kentucky Department for Local Government and provided to the city. In this case, it would be 0.160, or 16 cents, per $100 of assessed property value. If the city went with this rate, its revenue would be roughly $18,460 higher than what was collected last year, but it would be approximately $100,012 less than what the $2.15 million the budget calls for, she said.
Simmons said they are proposing a rate between last year’s rate and the compensating rate.
The proposed rate is 0.165, or 16.5 cents, per $100 of assessed property value. It would still reduce the rate for property owners, but this rate’s anticipated revenue of $2,114,050 would be roughly $82,522 more than from the previous year and it would a be significantly smaller amount – $35,950 – less than what is budgeted, compared with that of the compensating rate, Simmons said.
Again, whichever rate is chosen is per $100 in assessed property value. Using a relatively simple example of a property with $100,000 assessed value, $100,000 divided by $100 equals $1,000. That figure is then multiplied by the established rate to get the bill amount.
If, just for example, the rate were to stay the same as last year’s 0.169, that property owner’s bill would be $169. With the compensating rate of 0.160, it would be $160. With the proposed rate of 0.165, it would be $165.
That’s why, if the assessed property value has increased significantly enough, the total bill can still be higher, even with a lower rate.
Council members James “Happy” Neal and Chasity Lowery each spoke separately for several minutes about how it’s important for them all to be able to explain that to individuals who may think the city is raising their tax bill if it’s higher than before.
Bunnell reiterated the compromise of sorts of lowering the rate while still increasing the city’s revenue and not being as short on the budgeted amount. He said that when the budget was created for this fiscal year, it was believed that property assessments would increase a little more than they did.
“So, it’s a little bit of good and bad in the mixture, but I think it more than – on the long run – I think it works out for us. I don’t think we can go with the compensating rate,” he said.
“It would be crazy to do that and get less money,” Royse said.
“Hopefully, we can make that up in other areas,” Bunnell said, “whether with additional revenue or not as much expenditure in those areas.”
Bunnell said it signals to the public that the city government is willing to tighten its belt some as well if necessary to make the budget work, but $100,000 budget shortfall the compensating rate would create “is more impactful to our budget, to the activities of the city” than the roughly $36,000 deficit the proposed rate would create for that revenue line.
The 2024 property tax rate for motor vehicles and watercraft was 0.270, or 27 cents, per $100 of assessed value, and it generated approximately $330,074 in revenue, according to the summary sheet.
The budgeted amount from these types of property for the current fiscal year is $345,000.
Keeping this rate the same, as proposed, would bring in an anticipated $337,990, less than the budget figure by roughly $7,010.
Ultimately, with Councilman Freddie Norris absent, the trio of voting members agreed unanimously to recommend the proposed rates to the full council, which is expected to take up the ordinance Sept. 15.
The full council would normally meet next Sept. 8, but the mayor and city attorney are both going to be out of town attending a conference, so that meeting is cancelled, and the one on the 15th will be a special-called meeting. Royse has told Glasgow News 1 also that, with September having five Mondays, rather than have them meet two consecutive weeks, the plan is for the regular Sept. 22 meeting to be cancelled and they’ll have a Sept. 29 special meeting.
The Glasgow Common Council meetings begin at 6 p.m. in Council Chambers on Floor 2 of the Luska J. Twyman Municipal Building.
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