Charlottesville adopts tax rate at shortest meeting of 2025 

The formal budget adoption process in Charlottesville is now complete. Charlottesville City Council held a very brief meeting on April 24 to hold the second reading of the tax levy for 2025.

“I’m glad to say that we are at the end of the road,” said City Manager Sam Sanders.

The meeting lasted less than two minutes and took place three days after the public hearing for the tax rates. City Council twice postponed that state-mandated requirement due to advertising errors.

“Based on the state code of Virginia, we cannot vote the same night we have the public hearing,” said budget director Krisy Hammill.

There was no discussion. The motion was unanimous.

Three days before on April 21, Council held a public hearing on the tax rates. The budget itself was adopted at a meeting on April 17.

It is unusual for the Charlottesville City Council to adopt its tax rate for a calendar year after the budget for the next fiscal year has been adopted. That is what has happened this year due to two advertising errors that twice postponed a required public hearing.

“The Real Estate Tax rate was published at $.98/$100 assessed value and the City’s FY 2026

Budget is balanced with the revenue that the rate would generate,” reads the staff report.

The staff report does not state what that amount would be because Virginia law doesn’t dictate what must be in a staff report. However, the law does require the amounts to be posted in a public notice in a newspaper of record. In that case, that’s the Charlottesville Daily Progress which publishes three days a week.

The requirements are laid out in §58.1-3321. The first public notice was published in the wrong section of the newspaper, but this is what the advertisement read:

• “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 real 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.”

The March 17 public hearing on the tax rate to satisfy §58.1-3321 was postponed originally to April 7 but city resident James Moore filed an injunction based on a claim that the notice was not published in the appropriate space in City Hall. Though they fought the injunction in court, the city opted to postpone for a second time.

There were two speakers at the April 21 public hearing with Moore being the first. He said that by going with the lowered rate, Council was increasing the tax burden on property owners at a rate of three times the inflation rate.

“I know of at least two property investors that are simply reluctant to develop new housing without some assurance that your cost increases, city cost increases, will at some point in the future align with inflation,” Moore said.

The other person did not give a name and asked a question. Questions are not the reason for public hearings.

“We’re not going to respond right now, but I’d love to sit down and talk with you some time,” said Mayor Juandiego Wade.

Wade then closed the public hearing and Council then held the first of two readings on the tax levy ordinance.

The website of the City Assessor now contains the land books for 2025. The one for taxable land shows there are 15,137 taxable parcels with a total assessed value of $11,690,032,600. That yields a total of $114,562,319.48 in taxes at $0.98 per $100 of assessed value.

There are 519 tax-exempt parcels with an assessed value of $3,576,772,300. These include churches, nonprofit entities, and the University of Virginia. If table, these properties would bring in another $35 million in revenue.

Take a look at the details for 2025 and previous years here.

Before you go: This story is cobbled together from two separate stories from different editions of the Charlottesville Community Newsletter. These are the April 24 edition and the April 28 edition. This is a production of a Town Crier, as opposed to Town Criers, so it takes a bit to get to everything. If you want to increase the chance of plurality, support the info!