Texas Homeowners Facing Tax Hike After Storms

Homeowners in Texas’ most populous county are facing an 8 percent increase in property tax following recent storms in the state.
Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Texas as a Category 1 storm on July 8, knocking out power to almost 3 million people at the peak of outages, most of them in the Houston area.
Commissioners in Harris County, which includes most of Houston, are taking advantage of a loophole in state law that allows them to exceed the state-imposed 3.5 percent cap on property tax hikes without approval from voters. They are raising property taxes in the county by 8 percent after lawmakers granted an exemption on tax hikes above the cap to counties that experienced a recent disaster, Fox 26 reported.
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Tom Ramsey, the Precinct 3 commissioner and the only Republican on the County Commissioners Court, told the station that the county has a “spending” problem, not a revenue issue.
“They want to go through with an 8 percent increase in your taxes, which is $268 million more dollars than we had this year,” he said. “Let me put that another way. We were able to fund all of our programs this year, take care of all of our business this year, do everything we need to do this year, but we need another $268 million? We have a spending problem in Harris County, not a revenue problem in Harris County.”
Ramsey also said he was concerned the additional revenue would be spent on social programs rather than improving infrastructure and making it more weather resilient.
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Ramsey and other Harris County commissioners were contacted for comment via email.
Separately, voters in Harris County will also decide on a proposed property tax rate hike for the Harris County Flood Control District in November.
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At a meeting earlier this month, Harris County commissioners unanimously voted to move forward with a tax rate of 0.0489 percent per $100 of valuation.
The proposed rate is higher than the voter approval rate of 0.03316 percent per $100 of valuation, so voters must approve the measure or the Flood Control District’s tax rate would default to the voter approval rate.
The proposed tax hike would provide an extra $100 million in revenue, which officials said would be used to fund flood mitigation infrastructure and projects.
“The reason I can bring this unashamedly to the voters of Harris County is that it is for a specific purpose,” Ramsey told Community Impact News earlier in August. “It is for the maintenance of our flood control. We’ve got 22 watersheds [and] over 2,500 miles of infrastructure that we have to maintain. So I am very strongly in support of this.”