Submitted by Mike Corbett
You don’t have to look very closely to realize that something is out of whack financially here in Noblesville. We have the third-highest tax rate in the county, right behind Sheridan and Arcadia. Atlanta’s taxes are actually lower than ours. On a $200,000 home, Carmel and Westfield residents pay $500 less each year than we do and Fishers homeowners pay $700 less. Yet we don’t have the public amenities that our peer cities have and we had to institute a trash fee just to maintain our roads and alleys.
So what’s going on?
Running a city is all about good management, making sure money is being raised and spent efficiently. Although a city isn’t a business, some business principles apply. For instance, revenue should at least meet expenses, and expenses should get the best return on investment (ROI) possible. If you look around, it’s obvious our ROI isn’t what it should be. Maintenance has been deferred too long, public infrastructure needs attention, downtown needs some polishing.
Our tax revenue goes up every year. Every new home and every apartment in every new development contributes and we’re building them at record rates. You would think that we’re having to do more with less but we actually have more revenue than ever. Yet with all this new building and the third-highest tax rate in the county, we struggle just to maintain what we have.
The fact is that all of the building that our career politicians love to point to as evidence of success is part of the problem. Too much residential and not enough commercial property creates a huge demand on resources and amenities without the tax base to support it all. Single family homes are capped at a rate of only 1 percent. Rental homes and apartments are capped at 2 percent and commercial property is capped at 3 percent. So while we add huge amounts of housing it will never be enough to make up for the lost revenue of having a commercial base that’s too small.
One of the major reasons our peer cities are able to keep their residential taxes lower than ours is their commercial tax base. Businesses, which make money as a core reason for their existence, do more than just provide jobs. They also shore up the tax base, relieving some of the pressure from homeowners. Carmel brags about being home to more than 100 corporate headquarters. That isn’t an accident. Visionary leaders a generation or two ago made a conscious decision to recruit corporate headquarters to the city along U.S. 31, and the city now reaps the benefits of that decision. All that infrastructure is being supported by a tax base that is much more diversified than ours.
You don’t succeed by replicating someone else’s idea. We can’t, and don’t want to be, another Carmel. But we need our own version of their U.S. 31 initiative. We’ve actually started it in the Corporate Campus near Exit 210, but that district has been underperforming for years. We spent millions investing in the infrastructure but we haven’t delivered on the sales effort. We need to change that. We need a business-minded mayor with real world corporate experience with some vision and a firm understanding of how to build a strong town to recruit businesses that will be an asset to the community and help ease the tax burden currently being thrust upon you, the taxpayer.
That’s just the first step. There are other ways to run our city more efficiently, to get a better ROI, and we’ll tackle those in the next column, which will be appear in The Reporter on Friday.
Mike Corbett is a Republican candidate for mayor of Noblesville.