What are our city tax rates and how do they measure up?
Local property taxes are calculated using the corresponding “mill levy.” The mill levy is the "tax rate" that is applied to the assessed value of a property. One mill is one dollar per $1,000 dollars of assessed value. Assessed values are derived from the County’s Appraised value of your property, and are calculated at the following assessed rates: Commercial property at 25%, Residential property at 11.5% and Vacant land at 12%. There are multiple taxing entities that comprise a total mill levy in a community, and in Tonganoxie those entities are the City of Tonganoxie, Leavenworth County, State of Kansas, USD 464, Library, Recreation Commission and for 2023 looks like this:
To compare the City of Tonganoxie to the other two comparable cities (by population and total valuation) in Leavenworth County, which are Basehor and Lansing, we can look at the rates two ways: 1) City to City comparison and 2) Comparison of rates that include Library District and Fire District to the Cities that already include that in the City levy.
As you can see in the chart above, both Tonganoxie and Lansing collect for their Libraries through the City’s rate. An additional service that is collected within the City of Tonganoxie is funding for the Fire Department, while the other two cities have Fire districts that have their own levy rate. Adding both Library and Fire districts to get a truer comparison looks like this, from highest to lowest:
This comparison shows that Tonganoxie is the lowest of the three comparable cities within the County. After all, you can’t move to Lansing or Basehor and simply decide not to pay the Library and/or Fire District levies. Similar comparisons could be done for the other taxing entities that comprise the total mill levy for each community, although the County and State levy would be the same for each. Below is an example of how to calculate total property taxes for a residential home in the City of Tonganoxie, of which the City collects approximately 25% of the total:
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