MARYSVILLE — Property taxes in Marysville are going to get a modest rise next year. Just exactly how high they go is going to depend on the voters.
The Marysville City Council recently voted to put a property tax levy on the Aug. 1 primary ballot to fund emergency medical services such as ambulances and paramedics. That proposition would set the property tax levy for Marysville residents at 50 cents per $1,000 of assessed valuation, the maximum allowable under state law.
The current rate is about 39 cents per $1,000.
What it means for homeowners is a modest bump in property taxes. According to the Snohomish County Assessor’s office, the value of an average home in Marysville this year is $248,700.
If voters pass the August proposition, bumping the levy up 11 cents per $1,000, that average homeowner would pay $27.36 more per year on their property tax bill.
The levy would bring in a total of $3.2 million to pay for ambulance and paramedic services in Marysville. The proposition also would allow the city to raise that amount by up to 10 percent per year through 2023 in order to maintain a maximum rate of 50 cents per $1,000 valuation.
The City Council last week also enacted a contingency plan, passing a measure that would increase the levy to a more modest 43 cents per $1,000. That measure does not require a vote of the people.
The council is able to take that smaller increase because it “banked” the taxing authority by not raising taxes for several years during the height of the recession, Marysville Finance Director Sandy Langdon said.
If the proposition fails at the ballot box in August and the smaller 4-cent increase enacted by the council takes effect, the owner of that $248,700 home would pay $9.95 more per year.
If the larger increase were to succeed at the polls, the council would repeal the ordinance they just passed, Langdon said.
In any event, the city could not apply both levies to taxes.
“That would be a double tax,” Langdon said. “We would have to do one or the other.”
The current rate of 39 cents is the result of the complex interplay between levy rates and property values.
The current levy was set at 50 cents per $1,000 in 2008, just as the Great Recession was starting.
When property valuations fall, levy rates are often increased to maintain the amount of taxes the city is legally allowed to collect and provide financial stability to city services.
With the EMS levy rate already at the 50-cent maximum, the city couldn’t raise it any higher. So over the next several years, property values fell and the amount of money coming in from the EMS levy also dropped.
As the region emerged from the recession and property values rose, the levy rate fell to maintain the same amount of money coming in, but at that lower level of funding.
The City Council would have had to pass ordinances to increase the dollar amount coming in to boost the levy rate, but those increases also are capped by state law at 1 percent per year.
Once the recession lifted, the city started enacting those 1 percent tax increases, but that couldn’t keep pace with rising property values, Langdon said. The end result is that the EMS levy rate is now 39 cents per $1,000.
That means emergency services in 2017 received about $750,000 less than they would have if the rate had been maintained at 50 cents.
The current levy is expected to bring in $2.5 million in 2017 to fund emergency services, and the 4-cent increase would raise that to about $2.9 million in 2018. A full 11-cent increase would increase EMS funding to about $3.2 million.
Chris Winters: 425-374-4165; cwinters@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @Chris_At_Herald.
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