Focus at Four: BCS economist talks proposed Brazos County tax rate

BRYAN, Texas (KBTX) – Brazos County Commissioners proposed a new tax rate for the 2023-24 fiscal year. You can read more about the proposal here.

The Director of the Private Enterprise Research Center and Texas A&M Economics professor Dennis Jansen joined First News at Four Wednesday to explain what the tax rate actually means.

“Our taxes are going up, so one thing the discussion of the tax rate, I think is rather misleading. You don’t pay a tax rate, you pay the tax bill,” Jansen said. “The tax bill is your assessed value, which has gone up quite a large amount in this county, multiplied by that tax rate. And so tax, property taxes, are going up to the county and perhaps to other government entities in Brazos County, like cities and school districts. But they’re certainly going up.”

The lone dissenting vote against the new proposed rate, Commissioner Steve Aldrich said the proposed rate will generate $2 million more than what the budget calls for. Jansen broke down the pros and cons of operating with a surplus budget.

“It’s always useful if you’re operating any type of entity, business or government, that you’d like to have some buffer for bad events, something that comes up unexpectedly,” Jansen said. “So any sort of budget surplus would allow for that. I mean that the cons are how big of a budget surplus do you need? And that’s probably partly political.”

Jansen said despite what appears to be a reduced rate, if the proposed rate is passed, it will be an increase.

“I think it’s roughly around 16% now. Obviously, it matters what your personal assessed value for your home did,” Jansen said. “So some people’s [taxes] will go up more or less than that. I’ll be surprised if anybody goes down very much.”

“I think it’s important to realize the way this budget works is that they, I mean it’s again, it’s a political decision, but they decide that, the Commissioners decide, how much they want to spend and they look at the assessed value for property,” Jansen said.