photo by: Chris Conde

Douglas County Courthouse, 2018.

Let’s look at a whole bunch of numbers related to Douglas County homes. (The most relevant numbers at my home Monday morning were 61 and 3. The first was the degree reading on the thermostat, thanks to the energy czar’s decision to turn off the heater for the season. The second was the number of minutes I put my socks in the microwave.)

• Here’s a warning: Don’t expect this first set of numbers to warm your heart or your pocketbook. Rather, it points to the likelihood of higher property tax bills in 2023 for most Douglas County homeowners.

But how much higher does depend on where you live, as these numbers from the Douglas County Appraiser’s Office show. The county department recently calculated the median value for homes in each of the county’s three cities, plus its unincorporated areas. There were some big differences among the areas. Here’s a look:

• Eudora: $245,100 median home value, up 15.1% from a year ago.

• Lawrence: $272,000, up 10.9%.

• Baldwin City: $232,900, up 8.1%.

• Rural: $347,150, up 3.6%.

• Lecompton: $162,500, up 2.5%.

Eudora’s numbers certainly stand out. That Douglas County community is the closest to the $4 billion, 4,000-job Panasonic battery plant that is being constructed in De Soto. The impacts from that project haven’t really started to show up in Eudora, but it appears the housing market there is getting a head start.

The other interesting number, to me, is on the other end of the scale. The gap between Lecompton and everybody else just keeps growing. Just last year the price difference between an average home in Lecompton versus Eudora was about $54,000. Now, it is about $83,000. Lecompton is different from every other city in Douglas County in terms of the amount of city services, commercial enterprises and just general feel. But, it is still just minutes away from Lawrence and from the Kansas Turnpike. At what point does the market truly turn its eye to those significantly lower home values?

• The county appraiser’s office earlier this month released a broader set of numbers. The new numbers show the county’s total tax base, meaning residential, commercial, agricultural, industrial and other types of property. The tax base simply is the tax value of all those pieces of property.

The bottom-line number is a 9.4% increase in the county’s tax base, which is up slightly from when we last reported on this in March.

What that means is that Douglas County will collect 9.4% more in property tax dollars in 2023, even if the County Commission doesn’t raise property tax rates. Or, another way to look at it is county commissioners will need to cut the county’s property tax rate by around 9% in order to hold property tax collections steady.

Based on what happened last year, something in between is the most likely outcome. County commissioners — after seeing the tax base increase by a historically high 12.4% — cut the property tax rate by about 2%. That meant taxpayers saw their bills go up, but not as much as they would have if the county hadn’t cut the tax rate.

That’s the same situation county taxpayers will be facing when the County Commission holds meetings this summer to set the tax rates for 2023.

• All that information above was just for the county portion of your property taxes. Each city and township in the county also has its own property tax base. The county appraiser has released information on the tax base growth for each city and township. Here’s a look at the taxable value of all property for each jurisdiction:

• Lawrence: $1.39 billion, up 8.7%.

• Eudora: $67.84 million, up 10.8%.

• Baldwin City: $48.03 million, up 9.2%.

• Lecompton: $4.41 million, up 8.8%.

• Palmyra Township: $58.1 million, up 11.6%.

• Wakarusa Township: $47.46 million, up 9.0%.

• Kanwaka Township: $33.91 million, up 8.6%.

• Willow Springs Township: $30.53 million, up 10.9%.

• Eudora Township: $28.89 million, up 10.6%.

• Lecompton Township: $27.32 million, up 43.4%.

• Marion Township: $19.57 million, up 8.0%.

• Clinton Township: $14.71 million, up 8.7%.

• Grant Township: $13.22 million, up 11.0%.

The same deal applies to these jurisdictions: They will automatically start collecting more in property taxes, unless they reduce their property tax rates by a corresponding amount this year. Past performance is not a predictor of future results (although I could make a lot of money if people will bet me whether the sun will rise tomorrow), but most local governments did not lower their property tax rates last year.

Of the 13 cities and townships listed above, only three of them lowered their property tax rates by 1 mill or more. Those three were the City of Lecompton, Lecompton Township and Palmyra Township.

• No, home values in Lecompton Township did not go up 43.4%, if you are wondering based off the chart above. Instead, that number is a good reminder that there are a couple of ways that a property tax base grows. The first way is when the value of existing homes and real estate increase due to supply-and-demand issues in the market. That has been the main driver of these historically high increases in our tax base in recent years.

But the other way a property tax base grows is that new construction occurs in the community. Homes and businesses that were built since taxes were last due get added to the property tax base. That’s part of the reason why Lecompton Township’s property tax base increased by 43% but its home values didn’t. (The other reason is it is a fairly small tax base, so a few projects can produce a big percentage change.)

New construction added to the tax base of every jurisdiction in the county. For the county as a whole, new construction increased the tax base by about $20.9 million, according to the latest figures from the county appraiser’s office. When you do the math, that accounts for about 1.2 percentage points of the 9.4% increase in the county’s property tax base. So, that means existing properties in the county saw their values increase by about 8%, due to market fluctuations.

• The county appraiser’s office did release some numbers showing how new construction added to the tax base in individual communities. In Lawrence, new construction increased the property tax base by $12.03 million, in Eudora it added $1.29 million, and in Baldwin City by just over $900,000. As a reminder, this is how much new construction added to the tax value of a community. That’s different from the fair market value of new construction. Lawrence, for example, had far more than $12 million of new construction in the last year. But tax value is much different from fair market value. For example, a new home that has a fair market value of $300,000 adds $34,500 of value to the tax base because residential property is assessed at 11.5% of fair market value.

Another interesting way to look at the numbers is to determine how much of a role new construction played in the overall tax base of a community. A little math can give us that answer. For example, Baldwin City’s tax base grew by about $4 million, and about $900,000 of that increase came from new construction. So, when you use the exact numbers, 22.3% Baldwin City’s increase came from new construction. That percentage was tops in the county. Eudora was next at 19.7%, Douglas County as a whole was 13.6%, and Lawrence was 10.7%, meaning nearly 90% of Lawrence’s increase was due to increases in existing property values.

You could read those numbers as a sign that Baldwin City and Eudora are doing more to grow their tax bases through new growth than Lawrence. That may be correct, but the differences also could be a function of the law of large numbers. In other words, it is harder to grow a really big number by the same percentage as it is to grow a much smaller number. Lawrence’s property tax base dwarfs the tax bases of every other city in the county, so keep that in mind when you are making your own judgments.

But still, those numbers seem significant.