Bryan's tax rate to stay the same, revenue will increase nearly 20%

During its regular meeting Tuesday night, the Bryan City Council voted unanimously to keep the city’s property tax rate at $0.624000 per $100 valuation and took action on two rezoning requests.

According to the council, this rate is the same as last year’s rate, but would increase the total tax revenue by an estimated 19.11%. The increase in projected revenue is due to a rise in the estimated property value over last year.

During the meeting, the council also heard two separate rezoning requests. One request to reclassify a 0.31-acre lot located at the north corner of East 25th Street and North Haswell Drive from a residential district to a planned development housing district was unanimously denied due to traffic and congestion issues. The second request to reclassify .107 acres of land located northwest of Tabor Road and North Earl Rudder Freeway from a residential district to a commercial district was approved.

During the public comment period at the beginning of the meeting, Bryan resident Charles Mancuso spoke against keeping the tax rate the same and said the rate should be decreased due to the increase in property values.

“I say no to the ratification of the property tax rate; we’ve already [had] an increase in the values,” Mancuso said. “When the value goes up the taxes are going to go up too and a lot of people say, ‘Well, the city didn’t go up on the rate.’ Well, no they didn’t go up on the rate, the value of the properties went up 20-25%.”

By not lowering the current tax rate, Mancuso said residents struggling to pay bills will be expected to pay more in taxes.

“We’ve got people that are in dire straits, they’re having trouble buying food, paying rent, buying the necessities of life and here we are going up up and up with them,” he said. “I think y’all need to cut the tax rate about 30% to give these people a little bit of a leverage to buy what they need to buy.”

Mancuso mentioned several things that he believes the city could save money on and said they needed to cut back on spending.

“Y’all don’t need all that money,” he said. “We don’t need all that development now. Do something with it later. … It seems like we’re trying to stay ahead of our neighbor to the south of us. We don’t need to worry about what our neighbor to the south of us [is] doing. We need to worry about ourselves, what we’re doing.”

Following the public comments, the council heard a request to rezone a section of land in order to construct a five-unit development production, including four townhomes and the adaptive reuse of an existing corner store as a dwelling.

The council unanimously rejected the request citing that it would have a negative impact on the residential area and because the Planning and Zoning Commission had recommended denying the request.

Before the vote, councilor Marca Ewers-Shurtleff said she agreed with the commission’s recommendation and that she was worried high-density housing would adversely affect the area.

“I read a lot of their comments and I can’t help but agree with some of the impact that this will have that we’re not looking for in that district which is so close to our downtown,” Ewers-Shurtleff said. “We’ve done a lot of work to try to build a plan that will buffer our older historic neighborhoods from high-density development.”

Councilor James Edge agreed with Ewers-Shurtleff and cited specific issues that were brought up by the zoning commission.

“We talk a lot about integrity and neighborhood integrity for all neighborhoods in the city of Bryan,” Edge said. “I just think it’s not the proper location for this project. I think the project looks great. I’d love to see this considered for another part of Bryan, but I just don’t think this is the right location.”

The second rezoning request concerned facilitating the redevelopment of an adjacent property located at 3405 Tabor Road by using the land in question as a buffer.

Since the request already had received a recommendation for approval by the Planning and Zoning Commission, it was unanimously passed without discussion among the councilors.