PIKE COUNTY, PA — None of the Pike County Commissioners were happy to propose a 12-percent increase in property taxes for 2025, which they said would raise an average property owner’s …
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PIKE COUNTY, PA — None of the Pike County Commissioners were happy to propose a 12-percent increase in property taxes for 2025, which they said would raise an average property owner’s bill by $108. However,they agreed due in part to the long-term impacts of COVID-19 the increase was unavoidable.
“I think we have to do it to be responsible in leading a county,” said commissioner Ronald Schmalzle.
Taxes will go from 24.99 mills to 27.99 mills, a three-mill increase. One mill equates to one dollar per $1,000 of property value.
The average assessed property value in the county is $36,000, and the owner of such an average property will have to pay an additional $108 in taxes, according to Pike County Commissioners Chair Matthew Osterberg.
Commissioner Christa Caceres said that, as a wife and as a mother, the bottom line is important in her household, as it is in all households. However, taxes are communal, she said; “we all pay what we have to pay, and we’re going to have the services that we come to rely on.”
This will be the second tax increase for Pike County in two years, with taxes having risen approximately 10 percent from 2023 to 2024. Over the past two years, millage in the county has gone from 22.74 to 27.99.
Commissioners attributed the need for tax increases to the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
When COVID-19 first hit in 2020, there was “a loss of a massive amount of money by counties,” said Osterberg. Pike County didn’t raise taxes at that time, even though “maybe we should have been rasing them during those times,” because “we also saw the economics going on in the county, that that was not a time to be increasing taxes at all.”
Schmalzle agreed. When the county was working on its 2023 budget, it faced the need for a 20- to 25-percent increase in taxes in order to meet its obligations, he said. “We did our best to pare that down, but it is a result [of] the pandemic.”
Commissioners emphasized that the county had done all it could to cut down on expenses.
“We spent months and months going through this budget—literally months, page by page, line by line,” said Osterberg.
However, he added, “Costs have increased; inflation has increased; everything has increased in this county, as it has in the world.”
The proposed 2025 budget sees expenses rise from $55.4 million in 2024 to $57.8 million in 2025. The proposed 2025 budget sees expenses rise from $55.4 million in 2024 to $57.8 million in 2025. Expenses rose across the board, and no one item accounted for the totality of the increase; see ‘Pike Budget changes’ below right.
Child welfare increased by nearly $2 million.These costs are largely outside the county’s hands, because the county’s care of children has to abide by state standards, said Osterberg.
Carceres mentioned that around a quarter of the county is aging, and that the elderly are the county’s biggest customer in terms of services.
The county has taken steps to keep its costs down. Schmalzle said that this year, the county increased the contribution that employees will be paying for their health insurance coverage; those contributions had not kept up with trends in the private sector, he said.
However, “I think it’s also important that we come up with a plan so that [the tax increase] isn’t an every year occurrence, and it will not be an every year occurrence,” said Schmalzle.
The 2025 Pike County proposed budget is available at bit.ly/TRR-2024-Pike-Budgets.
The county has taken steps to keep its costs down. Schmalzle said that this year, the county increased the contribution that employees will be paying for their health insurance coverage; those contributions had not kept up with trends in the private sector, he said.
The 2025 Pike County proposed budget is available at bit.ly/TRR-2024-Pike-Budgets.
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