Projects/Data And Analyses/Mt. Lebanon School District/Historical and Forecasted Property Taxes

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Summary

In short, property taxes will be going up by as much as 45 percent in the next few years.

The Mt. Lebanon School District (MTLSD) receives most of its funding from taxes on the real estate of Mt. Lebanon residents. For the 2009/10 school year, it taxed residents at a rate of 24.41 mills (parts per thousand) on properties assessed at $2.2 billion, community wide, to raise $52 million for its operating budget. Your share of that $52 million in taxes, if you owned a middle-of-the-road property assessed at $145,000, would be about $3,500.

Historically, these property taxes have increased over time. More recently, the rate at which they have increased has itself increased, which is important: it means that your property taxes are growing faster than before. In the 1990s and early 2000s, each year brought an average increase of $0.5 million in new, community-wide property taxes per year. For a middle-of-the-road property, that works out to about $35 more per year, every year. These increases are real, not just inflationary effects. (All the monetary figures in this analysis are given in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars.)

According to MTLSD budget forecasts, the next 5 years will each result in property-tax increases of between $0.9 and $3.4 million per year, community wide, depending on what policies the district adopts. For a middle-of-the-road property, that’s a tax increase of $60 to $225 — every single year. In 5 years, the increases could add up to over $1,100 per year. (For more-expensive properties, the increases would be correspondingly greater.)

The following chart shows these trends, both for years past and for years ahead. Notice not only that the lines go up over time, but that they get steeper, too. That means (1) that property taxes are growing and (2) that the rate and which they are growing is also growing.

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The three lines at the right of the chart represent the school district’s forecasted property taxes for the next five years. Because of the need to renovate the high school and to fund underfunded pensions (PSERS), the lowest of the three lines, which assumes that the district will do neither of these things, is probably unrealistic. The top two lines, then, are more likely to predict the future.

Analysis

Feel free to browse the raw statistical analysis. (It may not be pretty, but at least you know we’re not making this stuff up.)