HAMILTON COUNTY, Ind. — The budgets of local police departments, fire departments and school districts will likely take a major hit if Indiana lawmakers implement a proposal to reduce property taxes for Hoosiers and some of the deepest funding cuts would be in Hamilton County.
A recent state analysis showed the county would lose millions in funding, second only to Marion County.
Hamilton County has been one of the state’s fastest-growing areas and Noblesville Mayor Chris Jensen has seen that change first-hand.
“Just in the past four years alone, for example, we have had 30% more daily fire calls for services through our fire department, fire and EMS,” Jensen said.
The increase in population has also led to an increase in the use of essential services like police, fires and road repairs.
“In Noblesville that would look like about a $30 million cut to property taxes over the next three years that we’d receive,” Jensen said. “It would eliminate about 20% of our property tax revenue that we receive currently.”
If the tax cuts are approved and the money is lost, Jensen said tough conversations will be necessary.
“We are a growing community. We have grown our place and fire department proportionally we have to take a look at maybe slowing that growth over time,” Jensen said. “There will have to be some cuts locally to some of those services that the folks of Noblesville and Hamilton County and across the state of Indiana have grown accustomed to.”
However, a majority of property taxes go to local school districts. According to the state’s most recent analysis, school districts in Hamilton County would see some of the biggest funding losses. Hamilton Southeastern Schools (HSE) would see the biggest funding loss in the state.
“If we don’t have strong education in the state of Indiana, then long-term — businesses are not going to come here,” HSE parent Stephanie Hunt said. “People are going to move here with their kids. They will look for other states that have a stronger education system.”
Those funding losses are a scary thought for Hunt who has kids in the district.
Jim May is the parent of children in the Carmel-Clay School district and said the funding cuts would undo the increase in property taxes that voters passed in recent years to provide additional funding to local schools.
“The only things that you can really immediately cut are staff and you look at staff and its teachers, bus drivers, people serving the cafeteria, special education workers,” May said.
The tax cuts are still being hammered out at the statehouse.
Jensen said he hopes lawmakers will take a more focused approach to getting financial relief to Hoosiers.
“I would say that we have reformed the system. We did it in 2009. The system is working as it was designed to,” Jensen said. “We just need to make sure that we take some surgical approaches to make some adjustments to kind of tweak the formula to protect vulnerable Hoosiers.”
