CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – The Albemarle Board of Supervisors is about to get its first look at the FY2027 operating budget when the county administrator, Jeff Richardson, presents his recommended budget in a public meeting on Wednesday. The proverbial elephant in the room is the rising assessments in property values, as the average increase was 6.17%. across the jurisdiction.

Therefore, if the advertised tax rate remains flat at 89.5 cents per $100 dollars of assessed value, the majority of Albemarle residents will be paying higher taxes.  Members of the board have publicly acknowledged the increasing tax burden while also expressing concerns that they needed the revenue to support the needs of the county, particularly in the areas of compensating first responders and the school division.

“Albemarle County tax payers were crushed in several ways last year by the increase in taxes but they all understood the need for the public safety hiring, they did understand it, it was hard for them but they did understand it, so that’s what we have to do is make those hard choices as we go along,”  White Hall District Supervisor Ann Mallek told the WINA Morning News.

When asked if she would like to see the tax rate remain flat she said: “Boy, I would be eager to see that happen because as I said it was crushing for many people last year.”

Mallek went on to point out her confidence in the assessment process.

“The county benefits tremendously from having an annual assessment, 20 percent of the properties are visited in person every year and the other are done with modeling and also have personal attention if there is a permit for construction or renovation or anything like that so that those things are kept up to date,” she said. “I feel even worse for the communities and the residents who get an assessment every six years because imagine the size of the change when those things happen, so there is certainly an advantage for having local people and local opportunities to decide as we go along it’s very, very helpful.”

While Mallek hopes the tax rate will stay flat, the supervisors can advertise a tax rate that is lower and adjusted to offset the average increase in assessments in an effort to keep the tax bills of residents flat.

When asked if that was something he would support as a member of the board, Scottsville Supervisor Mike Pruitt told Morning News he wouldn’t rule it out at this point in the process.

“I would say nothing is ever off the table, part of the problem we have in Albemarle County right now is that [reducing the tax rate] challenging to entertain without cutting a significant amount of services, and the main issue with that is that our county is disproportionately residential,” Pruitt said. “We have relatively little compared to the overall amount of land that we use that is bent on commercial and industrial.  That means our tax base is disproportionately residential.  I think before we talk about lowering residential tax rates because that’s where we get so much of our funds to operate core government services that our constituents ask us for and demand the strategy has to be significantly diversifying our tax base.”

Pruitt went on to say that he believed the investment of AstraZeneca and companies that would join them could start to diversify the tax rate but that it would still take 5-10 years to get to a point where there would be enough industrial tax revenue to offset the burden on property taxes.

Rivanna District Supervisor Bea LaPisto-Kirtley echoed that sentiment when asked about possibly reducing the tax rate during an appearance of Cville Right Now Live.

“Right now about 73% of our revenue comes from real estate taxes, frankly we don’t want that we want to find a way to diversify our taxes, you know and if we can in the future even lower our real estate property taxes,” she said. “Now, I hope nobody takes that the wrong way, I’m not saying we’re going to do that, but we’re on our way to making sure that we don’t have to rely so heavily on real estate taxes, we can rely more on industrial and commercial and AstraZeneca is part of it, plus their going to bring in 600 new jobs.”

So, collectively, the supervisors seem to be very optimistic in the long term prospects of lowering the tax burden on property owners, however the challenge is that it does not seem to be something they will be looking to do sooner rather than later.  The question for Albemarle tax payers, is how long are they willing to carry the current imbalance of residential versus commercial.