By Ronald J. Hansen and Catherine Reagor | The Arizona Republic
During the epic housing crash, property values fell by almost 50 percent in Maricopa County. Did property taxes fall a similar amount? Not by a long shot.
As homeowners clung to the idea that lower tax bills would be one small consolation of the bust, schools and cities and fire districts and hundreds of other government entities stared down their own financial crises in the five years from 2008 to 2012.
With property valuations in general dropping by double-digit percentages each year, equally less taxpayer money would be collected. But demands for education, city services and fire protection for essentially the same number of residents weren’t abating.
School boards, city councils and other government entities, scrambling to avoid the full effects of the property-value crash, wielded their power to raise tax rates to collect more money.
The rising tax rates created a vexing disconnect between values and taxes for all property owners, commercial and residential.
For homeowners, the frustration was felt with every payment of every tax bill, even though Maricopa County easily had the lowest residential property taxes among the nation’s 20 most populous counties in a national Tax Foundation survey.
Every year, many property owners expected to receive the bill that would drop in lockstep with their falling property value.
