According to the Tax Foundation’s comparison of the nation’s 1,800 largest counties, in 2007 Sedgwick County ranked:
-707th in how much we paid in property taxes, a median of $1,349
-462rd on how much we paid as a percent of home value (the median was $109,500), 1.2 percent
-823rd in how much we paid as a percent of median family income (the median was $59,678), 2.2 percent
The lower the rank, the higher the tax burden. 19 of the 20 most expensive counties were in New York and the least expensive were all in Louisiana.
3 Comments
We are a high tax state. This doesn’t help our economy at all.
462/1800 is about 25%….So we are in about the top 25% in terms of taxes. percent of value on property is the only comparison to be made. actual dollars is a meaningless statistic in doing any sort of comaparison without indexing it to property values. You must compare apples to apples. In other words we rank 1059 in home value (Our diligent reporter didn’t bother to extract this figure from the data cited) and 707 in dollars taxed. So the fact is that out home values are in about the 40th percentile, while our taxes are about in the 60th percentile! That over taxed disparity is relized when looking at the actual tax rate ( i.e. percent of tax on value of home. ) What should be understood from this data? If you live in sedgwick county then you have Lower home values and higher taxes than national average.
On a side note. Living affordability can be estimated easily as a ratio of median income to median home value. Since housing is largest expense of living. If you do an analysis on the data. Sedwick county ranks #273 in this respect, acording to this data. No suprise, Kansas often ranks high in terms of afordability indexes.
the fact remains that we are still rather highly taxed not fair or “middlin”
Another problem here is OUR SEDGWICK COUNTY AND CITY OF WICHITA TAXES ARE BEING WASTED ON FAULTY VISIONS OF THE VISIONLESS HOLDOVER COUNTY COMMISSIONERS AND SOME CITY COUNCIL MEMBERS.
Rather than repairing infrastucture of Wichita, the foggy visionaries have decided to pursue publicly financed “entertainment venues” and tax give-aways to airline and airplane manufacturers. These businesses should pay their own way or get out of the way.
Rather than planning a great city using the intelligence of its citizens, a few Wichita “insiders” have used their faulty visions to waste millions and millions of the tax payers dollars on the white elephant downtown arena and the River Walk project that is going no where.