Monroe Council games continue with tax hike

The Monroe City Council majority Democrats want to raise Monrovians’ taxes in their quest not only to secure reelection but also to push independent Mayor Friday Ellis out of office.

 

At its last meeting, the Council failed to ratify property tax rates for this year. Typically, local governments in Louisiana do this in June and July, which then gives parish assessors time to calculate and send out assessment notices and go through the appeal process before making the rolls final by November, with property owners’ payments due by the end of the year.

 

Instead, Council Democrats Rodney McFarland, Verbon Muhammad, and Juanita Woods rejected the measure, which provokes a small crisis. Instead, they wanted to raise rates using the “roll forward” option. That requires a public hearing that has to follow public notice laws, meaning it will be at least a month before that can occur. This delays considerably the process and means that final notices will be late. The process cannot start until the Jul. 22 meeting.

 

Muhammad, noting the Council had previously continued a vote on millages, complained that the Ellis Administration didn’t submit to the Council an agenda item to roll forward, claiming the majority’s preference to raise taxes had been articulated previously. Of course, while typically ordinances come from administration, councilors may place their own on the agenda.

 

Although Monroe collects several different property taxes, almost all are for discrete purposes and almost all are at their adjusted maximum millage, which is the rate to which the Council could raise by a simple majority. Conspicuously, the one millage that both is general and not at its adjusted maximum is the general alimony at 10.18 mills presently.

 

Muhammad made vague mention of spending he claimed was needed and alleged the hike would pour another $1 million into city coffers. That seems consistent with a raise to the maximum authorized millage, but which requires a two-thirds majority that Republicans Doug Harvey and Gretchen Ezernack seem unlikely to approve. Boosting to the adjusted maximum, or 11.99 mills, would raise around $828,000. However, if the maximum authorized, or 12.35 mills (and most of the others have a slightly higher maximum authorized than adjusted maximum), is not attained by the end of the assessment period, then it cannot be reached again unless quadrennial reassessment reveals an overall decrease in city property values.

 

The Council majority could push through the lower hike, but then as an ordinance Ellis could veto it and with the minority’s support sustain that. Yet this would launch a game of chicken that threatens to disrupt entirely the city’s ability to collect property taxes for this year.

 

Throughout, the majority seemed blithely unconcerned that they wanted the city to swipe extra money from the citizenry. Its thinking is entirely political: increase programmatic spending disproportionately in their districts — to their constituents and to related special interests — especially as, because theirs overall have lower property values than the minority’s districts, owners in their districts would pay disproportionately less of the increase.

 

Meanwhile, in 2028 citizens might take out their vexation over the hike on Ellis as mayor, the city’s most visible politician. It’s the same bad faith the majority has practiced over the past year, exemplified again in the meeting when the Council passed without any councilor comment a measure to match a state grant to improve Jackson Street. This came after the prior meeting when McFarland in particular extensively hinted at sinister motives behind Ellis pursuing this matter of about a dozen years’ standing and surreptitiously despite the administration’s above-board informative efforts.

 

That what was so controversial one meeting becomes nothing worthy of discussion the next again demonstrates it’s all political theater with this crowd, that appears to treat Ellis’ mayoralty as an illegitimate aberration standing in the way of its redistributive politics.