Franklin County taxable property values will fall by over 10 percent this year

Property values continue to fall in Franklin County and that means the county is facing some more serious budget cuts this year.

Local property appraiser Doris Pendleton said that taxable property values this year have fallen about 10 percent from last year with the chance they will fall another couple of percentage points before the final calculations are due in by July 1st .

In real dollars, the value of taxable property in Franklin County has fallen from about 1.9 billion dollars last year to well under 1.8 billion dollars for the upcoming budget year.

During the boom years the county’s taxable value was close to 5 billion dollars.

The ten percent drop in property values will translate into about a million dollars less for Franklin County to use in its budget if it doesn’t raise taxes.

County planner Alan Pierce pointed out that the budget picture is worse than it seems because the county is also losing another 300 thousand dollars because of the removal of federal prisoners from the county jail and 30 thousand dollars in medicade payments.

Commissioners said they will face some very difficult decisions when they sit down to work on the budget this summer.

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