At a special called meeting last Wednesday, Sept. 10, the Whitley County Fiscal Court approved the tax rates for 2025. All rates are assessed as cents per $100 of valuation. Here is a breakdown of the newly approved rates:
Real Estate – 7.1 (county), 4.1 (library), 1.3 (soil conservation), 5.3 (extension service) and 4.0 (health dept.)
Personal Property – 9.7 (county), 4.10 (library), 12.77 (extension service) and 4.0 (health dept.)
Motor Vehicle – 9.7 (county), 2.0 (library), 1.39 (extension service) and 4.0 (health dept.)
Watercraft – 9.7 (county), 2.0 (library), 1.39 (extension service) and 4.0 (health dept.)
Rates for optional tax rates for tangible personal property, including aircraft, documented watercraft and inventory in transit remained unchanged across the board.
“We are proud to see tax rates either stay the same, or go down,” said County Judge Executive Pat White, Jr. “We think it will be a welcome relief to local taxpayers.”
School Resource Officers honored
At the Fiscal Court’s regular meeting Tuesday, local school resource officers were invited to attend the meeting and were honored for their efforts to, as Judge White said, “protect the youth of our community.”
One item on the agenda called for the approval of a resolution pertaining to a coal severance grant project. White explained that these funds are being used to purchase tazers for school SROs, saying, “Tazers are something that you don’t use often, but if you have a threat serious enough that you have to draw a weapon, we would certainly rather it be a tazer than a firearm. We hope that this will help to keep everybody safer. That is what the studies and the statistics show, and we are just doing everything that we can to support those officers.”
White said the SROs should be issued the new tazers sometime during the early part of next year.
