Manatee County maintains property tax rates

As they work to finalize their 2018-2019 fiscal year budget in September, Manatee County commissioners will keep property tax rates the same, despite learning the Florida Department of Revenue may have been overpaying them by millions of dollars in sales tax revenues.

At their July 31 budget hearing, Manatee County commissioners voted 5-1 to set the countywide and unincorporated millages at a combined rate of $7.0435 per $1,000 of taxable value. The rate has remained the same for more than a decade.

“These are good times again,” Commissioner Betsy Benac said. “We’re at a state in our budget we are taking in more revenue than we have in a long time because values are going up.”

Although millage is not being increased, county property tax revenues are projected to grow between 8.1% and 9% — up to $237 million in total. The Manatee County Property Appraiser’s Office has projected the 8.1% growth, but final tax figures will not be released until late September. County Administrator Ed Hunzeker expects values to come in higher, at at least 9% — a difference of about $4 million more.

Despite the difference, he is not proposing a change to his proposed budget. Last year, revenue came in at 9.2% compared with the initial projection of 8.4% by the appraiser’s office.

Commissioner Robin DiSabatino had motioned to increase millage enough to cover the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office budget request of $1.2 million for more deputies, but the motion failed. DiSabatino said the increase would have given the county more “wiggle room” to address the needs of the Sheriff’s Office or even the state’s alleged accounting error.

Jan Brewer, Manatee County’s financial director, said there is still little information available about the state’s potential error in sales tax collections that have occurred since 2014. There are two pieces to the mistake — a half-cent collection that every county receives (state-shared revenue), as well as a discretionary half-cent (voter-approved) collected in Manatee County.

Preliminary estimates indicate Manatee County may owe $4 million in state-shared revenue and another $6.3 million in discretionary revenue. According to an email from Roger Hinson, of the Florida Department of Revenue, about 50 retail locations on North Cattlemen Road and University Town Center Drive were registered as being in Manatee County and should be in Sarasota County. Revenues from those locations would need to be returned to Sarasota, if the findings are correct.

“We are working diligently to verify that in fact tax remittances under these locations were mis-directed and to identify a more precise value and breakdown of those values,” Hinson wrote in an email to Brewer.

Brewer said she was told the state-shared portion would be a change of about $400,000 annually to the county’s operating budget. The sales-tax portion, she said, will more directly affect the School District of Manatee, which also gets a discretionary half cent. Manatee County has only collected its discretionary half-cent for about one year.

“The $400,000 is baked into the budget,” Brewer said. “This is (the state’s) mistake. Not our mistake. I don’t have enough information to even offer an opinion.”

Brewer said the state typically offers payback plans and it is “premature” for the county administrator’s office to have a specific plan of action. She said the office would work to validate any paybacks required by the Department of Revenue.

“What we’ve suggested to the board (of commissioners) is we’ll know a lot more information 30 days from now,” Brewer said.