County tax bills to come in couple weeks

Washington County Treasurer Sabrina Young believes property taxpayers will be pleasantly surprised when they get their tax bills in the next couple of weeks.

 Reporting to the Washington County Commissioners during the Monday, Nov. 4, regular weekly meeting, Young said she had received 2024 certified tax levy rates from the Idaho State Tax Commission the previous Wednesday.

 “We’re a little over a quarter of the way through the main field of the roll, so hopefully we’ll be wrapping that up this week,” Young said. “We will get to printing and prepping notices to get in the mail, and be earlier than last year.”

 Young said legislative changes during the 2024 session is the difference this year.

  “The additional homeowner’s tax relief went away, which in our county was $50-some odd thousand, so it wasn’t very significant when it went down to the individual property owner and taxpayer,” she said. “So, we don’t have to calculate that. The homeowner’s exemption, the HTR (homeowner’s tax relief) is still there.”

 Young said the state’s county treasurers were successful in their lobby to get the legislature for a change that tied the counties together on the HTR factor, like they were a year ago.

 “That caused for recalculations of the rolls across the state,” she said. “That is going to be a blessing. We all have individual factors based on your individual county homeowner rolls.”

 Young said she had done some manual calculations to test her software calculations on school savings.

 “I haven’t posted the roll yet, but am to that point and the school savings is significant,” she said. “Also the HTR, we didn’t get as much money in that homeowner’s exemption credit, but with the decrease in most of the levy rates across the county and the additional school savings, I think people are going to be pretty pleased with their tax bills again this year.”

 Weiser school patrons may remember this past September Weiser School District deputy clerk Barbara Choate reported the receipt of $782,000 in property tax relief funds from the state that were applied directly to the district’s two supplemental levies. That reduced what was just over a total of $1.1 million from the supplemental levies to right at $300,000 on this year’s WSD property tax levy.