It's that time of year again...new property tax valuations! What is a property tax valuation and what does it mean to a property owner? When you purchase a property, the county that you live in has a "value" placed on that property. The value is what the County Assessors Office has determined the property is worth. They use this value to assess a tax to homeowners. The tax amount is based off of the tax levy.
Let's get into more details. Say for instance you own a property and you purchased it for $200,000 a few years ago. You are not sure how much you pay in property taxes each year because for most folks, the tax payment and homeowner's insurance are part of the monthly mortgage payment so you might not recall what amount you pay. This is public information and you can find it out quite easily. In Douglas County go to http://www.dcassessor.org/home . Once there, under the tabs, click on the first picture which says "Valuation Lookup & Mapping", agree to the terms and conditions and enter your home address in the "Full Address" box. Do not enter street, avenue, circle, etc., as the search does not like that information. Keep it simple, house number and street name or number only, and click search. Names and addresses that are close matches to the information you entered will appear at the bottom of the map. Scroll to find your name and address and highlight it. Your property will be highlighted in the map above. If you double-click on your name and address line, a Parcel Report window will pop up. There is a lot of information on this small report but for this purpose, we are looking at your homes "value". You can see historically what your homes value was for the last 6 years or so. Look at the value over to the right to see the differences from one year to the next. Your value may have gone up, down, or remained the same.
With a little bit more information, you can calculate how much you are paying or, if your value has changed, how much you will pay in the future. To get the next piece of the puzzle, click on the blue link at the top right of the Parcel Report window called "Treasure's Tax Report". You have now moved to the county treasures web site and in the middle of the page, you will see a term called "Tax Levy". For example, let's say the tax levy is 2.76498. This is a decimal number but is calculated as a percent. Now you can take your home value of $200,000 (x) tax levy of 2.76498 (%) which equals the tax amount due for the year, $5,529.96. Generally, if you have a home mortgage, this tax amount is added into monthly payments which make up a portion of your monthly mortgage payment.
Now you might be asking, "What is a tax levy?" The levy is the total amount of tax collected by the county for services. These services include your county, public schools, Sanitary Improvement District (SID), Fire Department, Metro Community College, Natural Resource District (NRD), etc. Omaha and its surrounding areas have needed more and more schools due to the increase in population in the area. That is a very large portion of the taxes collected from each property each year. For me personally, 50% of my property taxes go to schools followed by 23% going to the SID, 12% to the county, 4.6% to the fire department, and 3.9% to Metro Community College. Other items with smaller percentages are the city county building, community library, Educational Services Unit (ESU), the Learning Community Capital Project and NRD. All of these entities use property tax money to provide services to the community.
To find this information in Sarpy County go to https://maps.sarpy.gov/simslt/. Add your address including a direction such as north (N) or south (S) but do not include street, avenue, circle, etc. Your lot is automatically highlighted in the map and on the right side, you will see property information. The assessed value is listed here. Then click on the blue highlighted parcel number. Enter your home address again on the new page and click search. Again, general property information will be displayed. Click on the blue highlighted parcel number again and the information will expand. Scroll about half way down the page and you will see the tax levy and how it will be distributed.
In conclusion, it might be frustrating when your property taxes go up but understanding the services provided to the community because of them is also important.
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