Property Taxes & User Fees
Content for week of Monday, January 31, 2022–Sunday, February 6, 2022
Required Reading
- Chapters 3 and 5 in A Budgeting Guide for Local Government1
- Chapters 9, 13, and 14 in State & Local Public Finance2
- ILDOR, “The Illinois Property Tax System: A general guide to the local property tax cycle.”
- Elaine S. Povich, “Why Are Property Taxes so Unpopular in Many States?” Governing , May 14, 2014.
- Jason Grotto, “How Unfair Property Taxes Keep Black Families from Gaining Wealth.” Bloomberg Businessweek. March 9, 2021.
- Christopher Ingraham, “Home in poor neighborhoods are tax at roughly twice the rate of those in rich areas, study shows.” The Washington Post. March 12, 2021.
- Andrea Noble, “Georgia Towns Too Reliant on Fines and Fees as a Revenue Generator,” Route Fifty, October 28, 2019.
- Mike Maciag, “Addicted to Fines,” Governing, August 21, 2019.
- Robert Mackey, “Tennessee Firefighters Watch Home Burn,” The Lede, October 6, 2010.
- TN Firefighters Watch Home Burn To The Ground Because Homeowner Forgot To Pay Fee
Recommended Reading
- “Deterring Property Tax Delinquency in Philadelphia: An Experimental Evaluation of Nudge Strategies.”3 This will be posted on Blackboard.
Slides
Download the slides from today’s class.

-
Robert L. Bland and Michael R. Overton, A Budget Guide for Local Government, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: ICMA Press, 2019). ↩︎
-
Ronald C. Fisher, State and Local Public Finance, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016). ↩︎
-
Michael Chirico et al., “Deterring Property Tax Delinquency in Philadelphia: An Experimental Evaluation of Nudge Strategies,” National Tax Journal 72, no. 3 (2019): 479–506. ↩︎