Get out your checkbook
County Commission OKs tax increase, including 60% in Zuni

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — The McKinley County Commission approved new property tax rates for the coming year with most property owners in the county seeing a small increase or decrease in taxes.

While city and county property owners will see their taxes increase or decrease by less than 3 percent next year, property owners in Zuni will see theirs increase by more than 60 percent.

Phil Gutierrez, a deputy assessor for the county, said that a person who lived in the city and owned a home valued at $150,000, paid $1,524.75 in property taxes last year. That same person would pay $1,569.30 this year, an increase of $34.55.

Since county residents do not pay any municipal taxes, their rates are lower than those paid by city residents.

A county resident who owns property valued at $150,000 paid about $1,253 in taxes last year. This year he will be paying $1,238.75, a savings of about $15.

That same property owner in Zuni, however, will see his property taxes jump from $1,007.35 this past year to $1,675.00 this year, for an increase of almost $670. It also gives Zuni residents the highest property taxes in the county. Last year they had the lowest.

But Gutierrez said that the Zuni increase is a little misleading and comes about because someone made a mistake last year and forgot to include the school district’s educational technology debt service tax when calculating the Zuni tax. For this reason, property tax payers in Zuni got a major tax break last year.

This year that tax — which adds about $13 for every $1,000 of assessed valuation — has been imposed.

It should also be pointed out that to get the assessed valuation of a piece of property, said Gutierrez, you take the value of the property — $150,000 — and divide by three. So on the county books, a $150,000 house has an assessed valuation of $50,000.

You can then figure your taxes by dividing the houses’ assessed valuation by 1,000 and multiplying that number by tax rate — 31.881 for city residents, 24.775 for county residents and 33.547 for Zuni residents.

The total valuation of all of the property in the county — residential and commercial — is going up this year, from $629.3 million in 2006 to $679.4 percent this year. That’s an 8 percent increase, which ties 2005 for the biggest increase the county has seen in at least the past 10 years,

Four of the 10 biggest taxpayers in the county have seen their property values go down in the past year. The biggest one was Pittsburgh-Midway Mining, which is in the process of phasing out its operation in the Black Hat area. Their assessed property value went from $33.5 million last year to $24.7 million this year.

That has not had a major effect on the county since the increase in the property values for the other six major taxpayers more than makes up for that decline. Giant Industries, for example, saw their assessed valuation go from $12.3 million last year to $22.4 million this year.

The total valuation of these 10 taxpayers went from $221.3 million in 2006 to $236.8 million this year, an increase of almost $15 million.