When it comes to paying more taxes, few people are happy about it. But nobody wants to buy a pig in a poke.
The de facto property tax increase Hamilton County commissioners voted 8-1 to adopt Wednesday is not that. Indeed, with funding for capital projects in schools that educate some 43,000 students, an expansion of the nobody-wants-to-fund-it-but-we-have-to corrections system and an investment in a sewage treatment plant that will provide capacity for 10,000 more homes, the increase pays for needs that are literally before our very eyes.
“It’s not about districts,” a retired, fixed-income grandmother from Hixson said before the county commission meeting in support of the then-proposed hike. “It’s about Chattanooga [and Hamilton County].”
It’s an opportunity, a retired businessman said, “to think about the next election, or the next generation.”
With 2018 an election year, commissioners could hardly be blamed if they chose to hold the line (which in this case was voting against holding the line on the county’s millage rate after lowering it per state law after a county reappraisal).