Despite the Lake Villa School District 41 school board asking for all the additional property taxes it is allowed under the state’s tax cap, taxpayers may see their tax rate fall, a district official said.
The proposed levy — which was given unanimous first round approval Monday evening but will require a second vote at a board meeting on Dec. 12 — requests $22.9 million in property taxes, a 4.4 percent increase in the amount of property taxes collected by the district last year, district business manager Anna Kasprzyk said in a memo to the board.
A state tax cap means that the school district won’t actually see all those dollars, though. The cap ties how much taxing entities in certain counties like Lake can increase how much they collect in property taxes to inflation plus any new growth from additions on homes, new developments and new commercial construction.
Lake Villa District 41’s school board has consistently passed levies designed to capture both the inflation and new growth allowed under the cap, according to Lake County Clerk records going back to 2009.
Kasprzyk estimates that the district will actually receive closer to $367,000, or a 1.67 percent increase, because of a low inflation rate and a small amount of new property development. But because property values in the district have begun to rise again, property owners may see their tax rate fall.
If the overall taxable property climbs the estimated 6.6 percent currently projected, the tax rate could fall to 4.49 from 4.71, which would mean the owner of a $200,000 home with a homestead exemption — assuming that home’s property tax assessment stayed the same from one tax year to the other — would pay about $134 less on the District 41 portion of their tax bill.
The majority of the new dollars, about $206,000, will go toward debt payments, she said. The rest of the increase will go toward offsetting the cost of salaries and benefits, which is the district’s largest operating expense.
These numbers are estimates because the school district does not have finalized property assessment data for the coming tax year, Kasprzyk said. How much the district will actually get next year won’t be known until March or April.
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