Death & Taxes?

At Monday’s La Grange City Council meeting, City Manager Jack Thompson floated the idea of a new special property tax to pay for maintenance of the City Cemetery.

Thompson brought up the idea during a preliminary discussion about next year’s City budget. Several City Council members opposed the new tax. Thompson said he will further investigate the issue and return to Council with other options at a future meeting.

“The parks department is very busy,” Thompson said.

The parks crew mows and maintains 126 acres of public property including the parks, cemetery, city facilities like City Hall and the Library, public rights-of-way and about 20 acres at the Fairgrounds. On occasion, they also mow private lawns when the owners fail to do so after receiving code enforcement violations. The parks department has four full time personnel and two part-time employees.

“They’re spread pretty thin,” Thompson said. “The cemetery is about 50 acres. It’s a pretty intense-type maintenance because you’ve got smaller mowers. You can’t go in with bigger deck mowers because of the graves. You also have a lot of weedeating. It takes up quite a bit of time.”

Thompson said he looked into alternate ways of covering maintenance costs of the cemetery due to the heavy load it places on the parks employees.

“There’s a thing called a cemetery tax, it is a property tax, that can be levied on the city,” Thompson said. “This tax can be used to pay for everything as far as maintenance goes for the cemetery.”

Thompson proposed using a cemetery tax to convert two of the part-time parks positions to full-time employees. One of those full time employees would be responsible for maintaining the cemetery. The other one would split duties between cemetery and other parks department responsibilities.

“In looking for ways to help them out, I found this, and I wanted to float this idea,” Thompson said.

The cemetery tax could also pay for supplies and equipment to maintain the cemetery.

“The law allows us to pull up to five cents (per $100) of assessed value,” Thompson said. “We’d be looking at a shade under two cents. That number is kind of fluid right now … we’d be looking at 1.955 cents, which would raise about $90,000.”

Councilwoman Kathy Weishuhn asked if the new tax would require a special tax election by city voters. Thompson said it would not. Council could implement the tax by passing an ordinance, he said.

“This would greatly help the parks department address the needs of the cemetery and all the other parks,” Thompson said. Councilwoman Violet Zbranek asked Thompson about other ways to pay for a full-time cemetery worker.

“Have you thought about raising cemetery lot prices?” she asked. “We haven’t done that in a long time rather than a cemetery tax. I don’t think I’d be in favor of that.”

The last time the City raised lot prices was in 2021, when the prices went from $500 to $850 for city residents and from $1,000 to $1,700 for nonresidents.

“For folks who live in the City of La Grange who are on an extremely low income, having another tax of any kind is not good,” said Councilman Ken Taylor. “If you’re living on Social Security and you’ve got to pay for food, your doctors, electric, water and all the other things, then you add more tax on top of it, they can’t do it. I’m assuming we’re going to raise the water rate, sewer rate, trash rate, and electric rate, and now we’re going to add this tax. I can’t assume how the other folks are going to vote, but I will not vote for an additional tax.”

“I can agree with that,” said Councilwoman Bonnie Busch. “People are hurting. The more we talk about taxing people, I have a hard time supporting that with the cost of living.

“I’m not disagreeing that we need more help,” Busch added. “I’m not trying to minimize that. I just know people are struggling right now.”

“I’m not in agreement with the tax,” said Weishuhn. “I’d like to see us come up with another way.

“It’s kind of like the school tax,” Weishuhn added. “Everybody who pays the school tax doesn’t necessarily have someone in school. Everyone who pays the cemetery tax doesn’t always have someone in the cemetery. We need to find another way to pay for it.”

“I agree with what everyone else has said,” said Councilman Bryan Kerr. “But just to be the devil’s advocate, the workers – this would help them, too. We’re helping the homeowners and the people who can’t afford to pay, but at the same time, we’re telling the workers, ‘Keep stretching yourself thin.’ There are two sides to it.”

Weishuhn and Busch said they agree that the City needs to find a way to help the workers at the cemetery, but they both asked for other solutions.

Thompson said the City of La Grange has a relatively lower property tax rate than many other cities.

“Some cities go for a lower tax rate, but they counter it with fees, because you still have to have the revenue to operate services,” Thompson said. “Or you have to cut services. So those are your three options: it’s either taxes, fees or services. Something has always got to give. Other cities are more aggressive on the tax rate, but they don’t do a lot of fees. The path La Grange has been on is really low taxes, which is fine. You can do it that way. But when it comes to revenue, it gets tight.”

Thompson said he brought up the idea of the cemetery tax to gauge the Council’s interest.

“I needed guidance and wanted to know what y’all’s thoughts are,” he said. “I understand, and we’ll keep looking at other ways.”

Thompson said he’s also looking at ways to boost sales tax revenue as a way of offsetting budget constraints across all City departments.

“From a proactive standpoint, what we’re looking at doing this year … is to go aggressively after retail and restaurants – both national chains and local chains for the downtown,” he said. “Restaurant and retail attractions are going to be very important for us this coming year. We’re going to be talking about our budget to the (Economic Development Corporation). It’s going to be very heavily loaded with retail and restaurant attraction and going after those kind of businesses to come in and relocate to La Grange to get our sales tax up.

“The great thing about sales tax is that not only do our residents pay it, but non-residents pay it as well. It’s one of the best forms of growth for revenue that we can have.”