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Residents fleeing should be a rallying cry for tax and spending
reforms, but Macon County taxpayers are seeing the opposite.
While more than 1,000 people left Macon County from 2016-2017 for other counties
– causing the county’s population to shrink – remaining residents saw their
effective property tax rates increase by 37 percent, giving them an effective
property rate that was more than double the national average.
Macon County homeowners paid an average property tax bill of more than $2,400 in
2017, for effective property tax rate of 2.45 percent, according to research
released April 4 by ATTOM Data Solutions, a property data company. That rate was
up from 1.79 percent in 2016. The national average effective property tax rate
in 2017 was 1.17 percent.
The county lost 1,009 residents on net to domestic outmigration from 2016-2017,
dropping the county population by 850 people in total. Since 2010, the county’s
population has dropped by nearly 5,000 people, driven by a net loss of more than
6,000 people to outmigration to other counties.
A great number of the losses come from Decatur, which accounts for a majority of
the county’s population.
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From 2010-2016, Decatur was Illinois’ fastest shrinking city, seeing
its population drop by 3,400, or 4.5 percent. In addition to hiking
the city’s property tax levy, local politicians have relied heavily
on other tax increases to make up for the population loss, including
instituting a food and beverage tax and a gas tax. But with so many
residents leaving the city, Decatur finds itself strapped for cash
despite all of its nickel and diming. The city passed a budget in
December for fiscal year 2018 that was more than $3 million out of
balance, with few concrete plans for how to make up the deficit.
To help the city and county rebound, officials in Decatur and Macon
County should steer clear of looking at more tax hikes as the answer
to financial woes. Instead, residents should demand reforms at the
state, county and local level to change course. Decatur,
historically a manufacturing hub, would benefit greatly from reforms
to Illinois’ unfair and uncompetitive workers’ compensation system.
And among other changes, consolidating and cutting the state’s
costly, duplicative layers of government could help reduce the high
property tax bills county residents are facing.
Without spending reforms like these, Macon County taxpayers could
see future increases in their bills, much like they saw from
2016-2017. And with that, they might also see more of their
neighbors head for the exits.
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