Harris County Commissioners meet on Tuesday and could vote on a property tax hike of nearly 8%.<\/p>\n
The proposed combined tax rate would increase by 7.6%, and county officials say the increase would help address an estimated $180 million budget shortfall. <\/p>\n
The potential hike is so controversial that Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo has gone as far as to call herself a fiscal conservative to show you she opposes it. That said, it’s the massive spending under her watch over two terms that has the county facing these budget issues.<\/p>\n
Precinct Three Commissioner Tom Ramsey, the only Republican on the court, opposes the proposed increase.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you decide to increase your spending $325 million, then you have no choice but to increase the tax rate to the highest level that we\u2019ve ever seen in Harris County,\u201d Ramsey said.<\/p>\n
Ramsey pointed to approximately $550 million in the proposed $3.2 billion budget that he considers non-statutory, meaning the county has discretion over how the money is spent.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a choice. You can look at $550 million and immediately start taking action in terms of cutting and eliminating and addressing problems,\u201d Ramsey said last week.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd to even consider [the tax rate] going up is fairly outrageous,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Commissioners Court starts at 9am.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Harris County Commissioners meet on Tuesday and could vote on a property tax hike of nearly 8%. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":429458,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57,66,223,27],"class_list":["post-429457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news","tag-local","tag-news","tag-texas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/429458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}