Types of property tax

You have likely seen many types of taxes on your property bill, and if you have been listening to recent Borough Assembly debates, you will have heard about property tax fairness. The terms can feel like a tangle of words: areawide, non-areawide, and service area taxes. Think of it like different pots of money, each used for a different purpose.

Areawide taxes are the simplest to understand. These are taxes that every taxpayer in the borough pays, no matter where they live. They support services that benefit the entire region. Schools are the biggest example and use a huge portion. When you pay areawide taxes, you are helping fund education for all students across the borough. Other areawide services include borough-wide planning, assessing property values, ambulance services, elections, and general government operations. These are things that serve everyone, whether you live in a city or a remote area.

Non-areawide taxes are a little different. These apply only to parts of the borough outside of cities. Residents inside the cities of Houston, Palmer, or Wasilla pay city taxes for local services, so they are not charged again by the borough for the same things. But if you live outside a city, the borough steps in to provide some local services, and non-areawide taxes help pay for those.

This can include things like managing road maintenance in areas that do not have a city government, capital expenditures, and libraries. Until this year, it also included animal control. In simple terms, non-areawide taxes help make sure people outside city limits still get basic services.

Now we come to service area taxes, which are the most specific of all. These are taxes that only apply if you live in a defined service area. A service area is created when a group of residents decides they want a certain service and will pay for it. A common example is fire protection. If your neighborhood has a Fire Service Area, you pay taxes to support that local fire department. Then there are Special Service Areas, such as the Chase Trail, Talkeetna Sewer and Water, and a couple of other erosion and flood-specific ones. These focus on a very narrow subject with a small audience.

The same idea can apply to road maintenance and street lighting through Roads Service Areas. If you are not in that service area, you do not pay that tax. If you pay the tax, you have the comfort of knowing it stays in your service area and cannot be spent elsewhere. It is a very local, choose-what-you-need system. There are local service area boards that provide input on those accounts.

If you are curious about your own taxes, the borough makes it easy to learn more. You can visit the borough’s official website and look for the finance or assessing department pages. You can also call the borough or attend a meeting of either your service area and the Borough Assembly. These meetings are open to the public and are a great way to see how decisions are made. If you want to take it a step further, you can even speak during public comment and share your thoughts. The direct link to the taxes page is https://transparency.matsugov.us/pages/yourtaxes.

One last piece of the puzzle worth mentioning: taxes do not fund everything in the borough. The Central Landfill, for example, operates as what is called an enterprise fund. This means it is paid for by user fees instead of taxes. When you bring trash to the landfill, the fee you pay helps cover the cost of running it. It works more like a business than a tax-funded service. We are the only borough in Alaska that operates our solid waste as an enterprise fund.

Understanding the differences helps you see where your money goes and how decisions affect your daily life. Call the Borough with questions that you can’t answer on their website.

Christian M. Hartley is a 40-year Alaskan resident with over 25 years of public safety experience and public service. He runs a freelance business, Big Lake Writer, from home in Big Lake that he shares with his wife of 19 years and their three teenage sons.