Public notice: Charlottesville’s lowered tax rate is $0.9128 per $100 of assessed value

Charlottesville City Manager Sam Sanders recently introduced a budget for fiscal year 2026 that is not based on any new tax rate increases. But Virginia Code has a set of rules for how much revenue localities can bring without checking in with the public.

“When any annual assessment, biennial assessment, or general reassessment of real property by a county, city, or town would result in an increase of one percent or more in the total real property tax levied, such county, city, or town shall reduce its rate of levy for the forthcoming tax year so as to cause such rate of levy to produce no more than 101 percent of the previous year’s real property tax levies,” reads §58.1-3321.

However, localities are free to proceed if they hold a public hearing, a public hearing that has to be advertised. The code further describes what the advertisement must include:

• The assessment increase from one calendar year to the next
• “The Lowered Rate Necessary to Offset Increased Assessment”
• “The Effective Rate Increase”
• “The Proposed Total Budget Increase”

Charlottesville’s advertisement was recently published in the Charlottesville Daily Progress with the following information.

• “Total assessed value of real property, excluding additional assessments due to new construction of improvements to property, exceeds last year’s total assessed value of real property by 7.36 percent.”
• “The tax rate which would levy the same amount of real estate tax as last year, when multiplied by the new total assessed value of real estate with the exclusions mentioned above, would be $0.9128 per $100 of assessed value. This rate will be known as the ‘lowered tax rate.’”
• “The City of Charlottesville proposes to adopt a reat estate tax rate of $0.98 per $100 of assessed value. The difference between the lowered tax rate and the proposed rate would be $0.0672 per $100 or 7.359 percent. This different will be known as the “effective tax rate increase.”
• “Based on the proposed real property tax rate and changes in other revenues, the total budget of the City of Charlottesville will exceed last year’s by 4.97 percent.”

A public hearing will be held on April 7, 2025 March 17, 2025 in City Council Chambers at the City Council meeting. This has been delayed to an advertising error. For some background information on the budget, take a look at my story. I’ll have a write-up of last week’s first budget work session in a future edition of the newsletter.

Some other public notices of note:

• The Albemarle County Board of Supervisors will hold a public hearing at their meeting on March 19 to declare a property at 5624 Brownsville Road as a blighted. According to materials in the meeting packet, the house is partially demolished and such a declaration would allow the county to demolish it at a cost of $31,000. Details here and more info in the next Week Ahead newsletter.
• The firm Roudabush, Gale, & Associates are fielding applications for firms to construct infrastructure in Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville’s Southwood Village 3. The ad tells people to use the company’s website to leave information, but the link isn’t secure so I’m not using it.
• The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality is enforcing an action against North Garden Ventures LLC for violations of the State Water Control Law. The company owns North Garden Plaza and is permitted to operate a sewage treatment plant that allows for discharges into the North Fork Hardware River, a waterway considered to be impaired due to the presence of too much bacteria. NGV knows they exceeded permissible levels and have entered into a consent decree. They have to take certain actions and pay a civil charge of $5,162.50. The public gets a chance to weigh in with a comment. You can learn more here.

Before you go: This is a story from the March 12, 2025 edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement. There are stories from the March 11 edition which have not yet been posted, but this one needed to go first because I want to put a link in the March 13, 2025 edition of Fifth District Community Engagement. Sometimes this makes sense. Or does it? You tell me. I just keep going through the motions.