Thursday, October 23, 2008

A Tool to Convince Your Neighbors to Support Y and Z

I don't know about you, but I find it hard to explain the formula for figuring out how much you would owe under Measure Y and Z to other homeowners. There's just no good way -- the math confuses people.

This is unfortunate, because there a lot of homeowners out there who are probably overestimating how much they would have to pay for the new bonds, and will vote no because of it. They may want to support schools but feel they don't have the means to pay for the bonds, such as those on fixed incomes or with very tight budgets.

It's unfortunate that we can't just ditch the formulas and simply tell a neighbor exactly how much (or rather, how little) they would pay for the bonds, isn't it?

Actually, I'm just kidding -- we DO have the ability to tell our neighbors exactly how little they'd pay, and it's public information. (You don't have to snoop in their trash to find out.)

Here's how you do it:

* Go to the Assessor's Website and enter an address in the Search by Street Address box. Start with your own address.

* When you look your own place up, the 2008 Roll Values will show your Land value, Improvements value and your Homeowner exemption. Since property tax bills came out recently, you probably have that handy. You can pull that out and verify that the assessed valuation that you're taxed on (Land + Improvements - Exemption) is the same on the Assessors site as on your actual tax bill. (I know it works because I checked my address and it matched exactly.)

* The next step is to check your neighbors. If one of them wondered to you how much they would pay, you can look it up for them and tell them.

* You can either look their address up like you did your own, or you can use the map on the left side of the screen to pick which one you want to look up.

* To do the latter, click on the icon below the map which is a white "i" inside a black circle. After doing that, you can pick a neighboring property to get its information.

I did this for my next door neighbor who's lived in her house for decades. I haven't discussed the bond measures with her yet, but now that I know her assessed valuation is $75,000, I can tell her that her annual maximum tax for the new school bonds would only be $36 ($48 / $100,000 X $75,000). Talk about being armed with a pursuasive argument for her. Wow -- she'd pay $3 a month to have fixed schools in her city. A pittance.

Another neighbor across the street has an AV of $62,000. That means the calculation for what he would owe is $48 / $100,000 X $62,000. That comes out to slightly less than $30. Not per week or per month. Per year.

People on fixed incomes are rightly worried about having to pay more in taxes. The good thing for a lot of them is that they have been living in their houses for a long time and probably have very small assessed valuations, so they would pay very little in Measure Y and Z taxes.

I did a few calculations and came up with another way of putting it:
Anyone with an assessed valuation of:
less than $52,000 pays under $25 per year for Y and Z bonds.
less than $104,000 pays under $50 per year for Y and Z bonds.
less than $208,000 pays under $100 per year for Y and Z bonds.


So if you're not comfortable doing the calculations yourself, you could use the reference amounts above. You can just check the AV, and then figure which range it fits in.

Then you're armed with your information that will hopefully put your neighbor in the Yes column on November 4. You just say to them: "Isn't paying $__ per year worth it to [keep our neighborhood schools][renovate our dilapidated schools][remove asbestos and other hazardous materials from the school buildings children are in 5 days a week?][maintain Torrance's reputation for good schools and help our property values]"

You may know the right argument to insert as the last part of the sentence - the above are just suggestions.

If you use this argument, please share your experience.

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