Looking up tax revenue records can reveal some pretty interesting things. Reporter Nickie Dobo has a
story in today's paper looking at how school district taxes have risen over the years, and how taxpayers who are already battling a tough economy are getting pinched by the growing tax bills.
As part of reporting that story, she checked in with the county's recorder of deeds and discovered something about the real estate crash that I don't think we'd written before: Revenue from real estate transfer taxes has basically fallen off a cliff for most school districts. (Every time a home is sold, the school district gets a small percentage of the price.)
The transfer tax only amounts to about 1 percent of school districts' budgets. But still, it's a few hundred thousand dollars they need to replace -- and a few hundred thousand is, well, a few hundred thousand.
This story is also the first time, at least in a while, that we've looked at property tax numbers over time. (Usually we do an annual story rounding up taxes and comparing the previous year to the current year). We're working on putting together a searchable spreadsheet of all of the numbers we used in today's story; check back here this week and we'll let you know when it's up.
Check out the story. We think it's a pretty good look at taxes over time, but there's no way we can cover every school-tax-related angle in one story ... so let us know if there's something you want us to look at and we'll give it a shot.