Surry County residents should be able to get their first peek at County Manager Chris Knopf’s budget proposal on June 7, when he is scheduled to present the revenue and spending plan to the board.
While he’s still working out details of the budget, Knopf said local property owners will find their property values have taken a fairly significant leap in value as a result of the revaluation of property completed earlier this year.
“Countywide…we saw somewhere between 8% and 9% growth” in property and land value, he said, marking a change from what county residents may have grown accustomed to in recent years. “We haven’t had growth (in tax value) in some time, probably going back to 2004 or 2008.”
The revaluation of property values is required by state code, with counties required to undertake the process at least every eight years. Surry County has traditionally done one every four years, although this latest revaluation, begun in 2020 and completed earlier this year, was five years from the last one.
“We did five years because we’re trying to get our revaluation on the same schedule with the surrounding counties,” Knopf said. He explained that when property owners dispute the new tax value of their land, it’s easier for review boards to have current property values in neighboring localities for comparison purposes. Surry County was a year off from its neighbors. Now, he said the county will go back to its four-year cycle as the neighboring counties do.
The county manager also said people in different parts of the county may find their property values assessed at different levels, particularly with some differences in the four municipal jurisdictions — Mount Airy, Dobson, Pilot Mountain and Elkin.
“What drove it (the increase in value) was primarily residential, throughout the county, Residential values have been rising quite a bit in the last year or so, but we’ve seen significant increases over the past several years.”
Knopf said part of that is the law of supply and demand at play — “We don’t have enough supply for demand,” he said of one reason prices, and values, are on the rise. “When you talk to people who sold homes recently, they’ve been able to do it in a matter of days, and they’ve had multiple offers.”
Knopf said that is particularly the case in the eastern portion of the county, and looks to be so for some time going forward. Continued growth in Winston-Salem is driving part of that, with people wanting to live further out from the city, with some land around their residences.
The county manager also said he would expect the final budget proposal to reflect a return to normal as the COVID-19 pandemic continues winding down.
The current year’s budget stands at $78,702,753, which was lower than the previous year’s budget of $80,485,924. He said the pandemic began last year as the county was in the midst of its budget process, so “we switched gears in mid-process,” to build a budget reflective of the anticipated drop in the economy.
“We had been steadily increasing throughout the decade as revenues were growing…Last year we made some cuts,” he said.
Now, with COVID-19 restrictions being lifted and business returning to normal, he said he would anticipate the new budget to be more in line with previous years. “In this year’s process, we’ve utilized a more typical budget process. There will be some lingering COVID-19 economic effects, but this year we anticipate things will return to normal.”
The current tax rate is 58.2 cents per $100 of assessed value, where it’s been for a dozen or more years. As required by state law, he said the new budget will show what the tax rate would need to be with the revaluation of property in order to maintain a revenue-neutral budget, but the commissioners are not bound by any law to adopt that tax rate.
Knopf said he hopes to be finished with his budget proposal within a week, hopefully getting the document into the hands of the commissioners then. “That way they’ll have a full week to digest it before the public presentation,” he said.
The presentation is set for June 7, with a public hearing slated for June 21. “We will probably have at least one work session in between those two dates,” he said.
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com
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