Humboldt City Council approves lower tax levy

Taxable valuations decrease slightly

By PHIL MONSON
HUMBOLDT - After a public hearing with no objectors, the Humboldt City Council approved a property tax levy for the 2025-26 fiscal year at their meeting on Monday night, April 7.

The tax rate will be $15.8934 per $1,000 of assessed valuation. It is down slightly from the current rate of $16.1869 for the 2024-25 budget.

Total expenditures are estimated to be $11,236,864 with total revenues anticipated to be $10,973,874.

“This is the second year we have been able to do this (formula) under House File 718 approved by the legislature a couple of years ago,” Humboldt City Administrator Cole Bockelmann said.

“Our taxable valuations went down and our levy went down. The problem with the formula and the notice which had to be mailed out recently assumes a 10 percent assessment increase, which we didn’t have in Humboldt. It was less than 1/10 of a percent of our total assessed value,” Bockelmann said.

“Our levies are pretty static for debt service. Our general operations went down because our levy went down. The only one that went up was our unified law enforcement. We lowered our employee benefits by quite a bit,” Bockelmann said.

“Overall, our property tax revenues went down and our levy went down by about $0.25 per $1,000. Again, the rollback is out of our control along with valuations,” Bockelmann said. “That’s probably the biggest decrease we’ve had in quite a few years.”

Read the full story in this week's issue of the Humboldt Independent