Pickerington Area Taxpayers Alliance

Someone out there must understand this, I hoping at least...

Property values are reassessed periodically, usually resulting in a higher property valuation. However, my understanding of the school portion of our taxes (which the majority of our property taxes go towards) is that the schools can only the amount of the levy, no more. So if everyones valuation goes up by a similar percentage, so what?? Won't this kind of wash itself out? Throw in the influx of very high priced omes, and my relative percentage may actually go down..

What am I missing??

missing nothing,

You are not missing anything, it does go down if you vote no new taxes....
but remember the new High School, school construction levy, it was different, when you went ''no new millage,'' you also voted to allow the no new millage amount to be determined based on your new valuation, each and every time the valuation goes up, so in that bond issue case, your taxes go up, no new mils, but more bucks because your taxing valuation is higher when those mils kick in as they are retired on the older construction and you are taxed at a new higher rate and those mils are figured on each valuation increase.

So in the best case your taxes could go down, but the expenses to run the schools do go up so they will try to milk you at the ballot box at a minimum of every two years.

RE taxes are increasing

First you must consider where you live. If you live in the PLSD and in Violet Twp then your ?“VOTED?” rate is 100.70. If you live within the City of Pickerington your ?“VOTED?” rate is 107.00.


There are also some rollbacks given to home owners and senior citizens in the form of homestead rollbacks. These could amount up to 12.5% roll of your total tax bill.

The average property owner does pay a dollar amount determined by the over all property valuation of the entire district. If an operating levy was passed to bring in $10 Million then as more properties are improved that dollar amount is shared by more property owners. That reduced amount is referred to as the ?“Effective Rate?”. In the City of Pickerington that effective rate is: 62.385432. If you live in the unincorporated township your effective rate is: 56.700161. Currently the effective rate of the school district is: around 33 mils.

If you have a home with a market value of $200,000 and the county has appraised your property at that value then your assessed value will be 35% of the market value and in this case that is $70,000.

If this $200,000 value home ($70,000 assessed value) is in the city that works out to be: $4,366 per year in real estate taxes.

If this $200,000 value home ($70,000 assessed value) is in the unincorporated township then your real estate tax bill per year should be: $3,969 per year.

If this is your primary resident then you can deduct an additional 2.5% from that tax bill.

If you are over 65 and you qualify you could also get an additional 10% deduction from you tax bill.


The highest real estate tax bills in the county are paid by the Citizens of Pickerington with an effective rate of 62.385432. Next are the Violet Twp residents with a rate of 56.700161.

The Canal Winchester SD pays a rate of around 50.247766. They just passed another levy so I am not sure where their rates will go. The lowest rates are in Rushville @ 33.629552


One of the posters is correct in that when we passed the 11 mil levy to build the new North high school it was billed as ?“minimal millage?” This will continue to increase our local real estate rates as our home increase in value. This is in addition to the 10 mil inside millage.

In the past if we had a couple of years with no levies passed we actually saw our tax bills decrease slightly. If you check your Real estate tax payments on the Auditors web site you will find that trend is not happening now. Our real estates taxes are increasing at about a 3% rate every year (even without any additional levies being passed). Someone please bring this to the attention of Doug Parker who thinks our rates are decreasing.

I can?’t predict when this will reach the point where we can?’t afford more taxes but judging by the negative vote last week on the school bond levy we are getting very close. It is very interesting that our local news media has not given us the new figures for PLSD average daily attendance at our schools. With the City having a moratorium last year how did that affect the number of pupils in our schools?



By Running out of dough

More info

Correct me if I am wrong but I believe the operating levies can increase the property tax every year there is a new property appraisal.

Also, the moratorium possibly did not work as expected because the previous council/manager allowed developers to prepay permits so they could continue to build at the same rate as before the moratorium.