Moving from a hot, muggy July to a hot/muggy August isn’t going to be any fun at all. I don’t know about you , but I’m kind of like my neighborhood cats. I don’t want to do much on these hot days except to lay around in the shade.
I thought maybe July would be a slow month at the city, but I’ve been busy almost every day meeting with different groups and looking at the construction that is improving the city’s infrastructure. So unfortunately I haven’t been able just to laze around like the cats.
There is an old adage about death and taxes. Simply put the only two sure things are death and taxes. And we face these possibilities every day. Stretching the analogy, cats pay their taxes by chasing away (or eating) annoying creatures like chipmunks or mice, and there are a number of cat predators around like coyotes not to mention the lesser pests like ticks, fleas, and mosquitos.
Paying taxes is never pleasant. They are an inevitable part of our lives. So the other day, I took a sample of the parcels that make up the 2010 tax digest for the city. The idea was to see if the property taxes had been paid on the parcels. Since the county collects our property taxes along with the county taxes, we don’t have a good way of determining when a parcel’s taxes have (or not) been paid. So I took a sort of random sampling of the 10 tax digest parcels, looked them up on the county’s website. Guess what I found. Of the ten parcels, taxes have been paid in full on eight of the parcels. Two of the parcels have not had any 2010 taxes paid, but they are not yet considered by the tax commissioner’s office to be in default even though the taxes were fully due and payable by November 2010.
Of the $20,195 assessed by the county, $1,886 remains unpaid. Of the $2,499 assessed by the city, $194 remains unpaid. Maybe the heat got to these taxpayers, or maybe the economy.
While my survey is in no wise valid as a predictor of total tax collections, I found it interesting. Like my neighborhood cats, I find early morning and early evening the time to get things done. Yesterday evening, I saw one of the neighborhood cats running full out across the backyard. I couldn’t tell if the cat was running from a predator, chasing prey, or just being a cat.
I’m looking forward to fall, and I bet the cats are too. Maybe cooler weather will inspire our nearly delinquent taxpayers to action too.
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