Editor:

The county prints, stamps and mails approximately 27,000 tax bills to collect its own taxes. Additional lines on that tax bill do not cost the county anything except the ink with which to print additional lines. The county’s tax bill goes to the owner of every piece of property real, mineral or personal in the county (unless the property is exempt or the tax is zero).

The four school districts in Bee County cover the entire county; therefore if you get a county tax bill, it will have a school district tax on it also, along with the county farm to market tax, the Coastal Bend College tax, the groundwater conservation water district tax and one of the four fire districts or the City of Beeville and the Beeville Water District. Pawnee, Pettus and Skidmore-Tynan schools have some taxable properties that lie outside the county on which the Bee County TAC collects taxes for the schools. The parcels that lie outside the county have costs above what it costs the county to collect its own taxes, so a per parcel fee for those parcels would be applicable.

The college’s tax is collected on the same bill as the school and county tax; however, the college does not pay $1.50 or $1.98 per parcel. The college has a low tax rate. The commissioners seem to believe that it costs more to collect for a jurisdiction with a high tax rate than it does to collect for a jurisdiction with a low tax rate. That is just not true.

According to the latest Bee-Picayune article on the tax collection fee, at $1.50 the schools would pay a total of $50,047 and at $1.98 a total of $66,062. In many cases, the $1.50 is more than the total tax assessed by the school. The commissioners are attempting to supplement the county’s revenue with tax dollars intended for educating the students of Bee County. The intent of the Texas Property Tax Code in this matter is to reimburse the county for costs above its own costs, not to have the county make money on collecting taxes for other jurisdictions. The offer of $1 a parcel by the schools is more than fair and still above what it costs the county to collect for itself. The schools are not trying to take advantage of the county.

The Texas property tax code reads: “The governing body of a taxing unit authorized to have its own assessor and collector by official action in the manner required by law for official action by the body may require the county to assess and collect the taxes the unit imposes in the county in the manner in which the county assesses and collects its taxes.” (This is what the schools that have a resolution appointing the Bee County tax assessor-collector their collector have done.)

The tax code also says: “The county assessor-collector is entitled to a reasonable fee, which may not exceed the actual costs incurred, for assessing and collecting taxes for a taxing unit pursuant to Section 6.23(a)(1), (2), or (3).

(c) The assessor or collector for a taxing unit other than a county is entitled to reasonable compensation, which may not exceed the actual costs incurred, for assessing or collecting taxes for a taxing unit pursuant to Subsection (b) of Section 6.23 of this code.”

(There is no mention in b or c about who determines actual costs, that comes from a Jim Maddox AG opinion, and that opinion indicates that the tax assessor-collector is to prepare a report for the commissioners court to use in calculating actual costs. I prepared the report for several years, submitted it to the court for them to determine actual costs and they never acted on it. The ad hoc committee’s study and all other attempts to determine a fee fall way short of what is required in the AG opinion, and as Mike Knight has stated time and again, an AG opinion is just another attorney’s opinion.

Andrea Gibbud

Former Bee County Tax Assessor-Collector

1993-2008