We all knew a massive County tax increase was coming because four of five members of the Commissioners Court are tax-and-spend liberals who would rather waste our hard-earned money than reduce government expenditures.
On Monday, the Commissioners Court voted 4-1 under agenda item 9C to increase the County property tax rate from $0.426323 per $100 of valuation to $0.458889.
Add to that the increase in property values and we are talking about an annual tax increase of $137 on the average-value El Paso home ($221,726).
Voting in the affirmative were County Judge Ricardo Samaniego and Commissioners Michelle Butler, David Stout and Sergio Coronado.
As expected, only Commissioner Iliana Holguin voted against the new tax rate. She was kind to provide us with an exclusive comment: “It’s not sustainable to think that we can keep raising taxes on our residents to meet our budget shortfalls. We have to make adjustments to our budget and decrease expenses when necessary.”
By contrast, Commissioner Coronado declared “there’s not a whole lot of places for us to cut.”
Really? We suggest he start with his own bloated salary. The County Commissioners have voted to increase their salaries by 112.9% during the last ten years.
Next, they can reduce the salaries of their senior staffers, who are paid over $100,000 per year plus benefits.
After that, they can slash the salaries of other members of the upper administration along with their staffers, and then they can conduct a structural audit of every department and program and eliminate several hundred non-essential positions.
Oh yes, and they can cancel the tens of millions in new water infrastructure for the colonias and apply for federal and state grants to cover those costs, as they should.
They can also legally opt to cancel voter-approved bond expenditures that are non-essential, and there are a lot of them!
If the budget is so tight, perhaps they should have thought of that before allocating $1,000,000 for the Debt Plaza last September.
Predictably, Stout and Coronado blamed the increase on the Texas Legislature for burdening the County with unfunded mandates like Operation Lone Star.
Following the vote, Stout immediately issued a media release making every excuse possible for increasing our tax, but the fact is that he, his colleagues, Betsy Keller, and their staff did not aggressively rise to the financial challenge imposed upon us by the State and do everything possible to avert a tax increase.
The media reports following the tax vote were painfully weak, with only Diana Castillo of KTSM 9 News citing the $137 increase for the average homeowner.
The worst reporting was from the County itself, with no mention of the $137 increase during discussion and a general lack of clarity from Staff. We were unable to understand the tax impact after following the Court’s comments very closely and had to study the backup to locate the $137 figure buried there.
According to County Chief Administrator Betsy Keller, the new tax rate will form the basis for the final adopted budget, which will include $28,381,143 in additional taxpayer dollars, thanks to Monday’s vote.
When adding the tax increases from the City ($83) and UMC ($72) to the $137 County increase, the average homeowner can expect to pay about $292 more in local property tax in 2026.
The November 2026 General Election cannot come soon enough.