Bloomington escaping worst effects of tax caps, fiscal policy institute says

Those are some observations from a report released Tuesday by the Indiana Fiscal Policy Institute that examines the fiscal health of Bloomington and 17 other Hoosier municipalities: Anderson, Carmel, Elkhart, Evansville, Fishers, Fort Wayne, Gary, Greenwood, Hammond, Jeffersonville, Kokomo, Lafayette, Muncie, New Albany, Noblesville, South Bend and Terre Haute.

John Stafford, the retired director of the Community Research Institute at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne and the author of the report, said the story is different for each community.

“The property tax caps have indeed saved money for property owners, but at the expense of the finances in several cities across the state. The effect was exacerbated by the coincidence that the property tax caps were enacted during a recession,” he writes in the report. “Any particular city’s fiscal health, however, was largely determined by how it responded to the caps and the recession.”

For Bloomington, the story is one of a university city that weathered the recession and managed to respond to property tax caps in a way that minimized their impact.