Never Leave Town the Second Week of August

My neighbor's text came in at 11:40 Wednesday night, my time, which was not Austin time. I was in a motel two states north with a window unit I had turned off on purpose, a sentence I have not been able to say since the Clinton administration.

The text said: "they did it."

No punctuation, no context. In this town that could mean anything. They tore down the taco trailer. They renamed the taco trailer. They put the taco trailer in a podium-level food hall with a $14 horchata. But it was the second week of August, and I know what the second week of August is for.

Here are the facts, as reported by Community Impact: on August 12, City Council adopted a $6.63 billion budget, the biggest the city has ever passed, and set the property tax rate at the maximum allowed without going to voters. The mayor and one council member voted no. Everybody else voted yes.

So I did what any responsible homeowner does after a vote he couldn't attend. I sat on a motel bedspread with a ballpoint and the back of a laminated breakfast menu and wrote out the bill the county will mail me in October. I don't have the real one yet. Nobody does. This one is a forecast, the way a weatherman forecasts a hurricane: confident about the general direction and vague about which roof.

All line items below are my own invention and should be read as such. The math is emotional, not municipal.

Line 1: Base Charge for Owning the Same Dirt

My lot has not changed since I bought it. It's the same quarter acre of caliche, the same pecan dropping the same twigs on the same truck. The dirt did not get a promotion. The dirt did not learn Python. Yet every spring a letter arrives from the appraisal district telling me my dirt has been working hard and deserves recognition.

I've lived here long enough to remember when a house near Burnet Road was something you bought because it was cheap and close to a Taco Cabana. Now the same house is described in listings as "a rare opportunity," which in real estate means it has a roof.

Line 2: Maximum Allowable Enthusiasm

This is the line the vote was about. State law gives a city a ceiling on how much it can raise without asking voters, and Council went right up to it and tapped it with a broom handle like a downstairs neighbor.

I want to be fair here. Going to the ceiling is legal. It's written down. Putting a thing in the rules doesn't make it a dare, though. Every buffet in Texas lets you go back for a fourth plate, and the honest ones still give you a look.

What gets me isn't the number. It's the posture. "The most we can do without asking you" is a phrase you'd also hear from a teenager who borrowed the car.

Line 3: Absence Surcharge

Applies to residents who were out of town for the vote.

Nobody told me this was the week. Well, somebody did. The agenda was posted, the hearings were noticed, the whole thing was as public as a chili cook-off. I just made the classic Austin error of assuming that if it was important, it would happen at a time a person could reasonably attend. Instead it happened while I was eating pie in a town where the high was 74 and people kept saying "chilly" without irony.

I am told my presence would not have changed the outcome. I am aware. I would have liked to not change it in person.

Line 4: Credit, Homestead Exemption

This is the one line on the bill where I say thank you, and I mean it. The exemption is real money. Whoever fought for it, I'd buy you a Shiner, though at current prices I'd ask you to split it with me.

Line 5: The Record

Six point six three billion dollars.

I tried to picture it and couldn't, so I converted it into units I understand. My first apartment, off Riverside, a one-bedroom where the bathroom fan sounded like a small plane landing, rented for $385 a month. I wrote out the division on the breakfast menu and ran out of menu.

Let's just say it covers a lot of bathroom fans.

I don't think a big number is automatically a bad number. Cities cost money. Buses cost money, pools cost money, the library that let me read every Larry McMurtry novel for free in 1991 cost money. Somebody has to fix the potholes on Manor Road, eventually, before the potholes form their own neighborhood association.

But "record" is a word you use for fish and rainfall. When a city starts setting them every year, it's no longer a record. It's a habit.

Line 6: Line Item Not Visible to the Naked Eye

Every budget has a part that lives in a PDF on page 340 under a heading like "Interdepartmental Strategic Alignment Services." I'm not saying it's wasteful. I'm saying I've never met it. I've met the lifeguard at Deep Eddy. I've met the guy at the Twin Oaks branch who renewed a book I'd held hostage for six weeks and didn't charge me the full fine. I can point to those.

What I'd like, as a taxpayer, is a ratio. For every dollar going to a thing I can't find, a dollar going to a thing I can. A water fountain that works at Ramsey Park. A bus that arrives at the time painted on the sign. A crosswalk button on South First that is connected to anything at all.

Line 7: Pass-Through to the People Who Don't Own

The renters will pay this too. They just won't get a bill with their name on it. They'll get a lease renewal in the spring with a cheerful note from a property management company in another state explaining that "rising operating costs" require an adjustment, and the adjustment will be larger than the tax, and the note will have a little sun icon on it.

The landlord will forward the tax plus a little extra for his trouble, like a waiter adding the tip himself. A city that wants people to keep living here should keep that line in mind every August, preferably in bold.

Line 8: Two Dissents, Noted

The mayor and one council member voted no. I won't pretend to know their reasons beyond what's on the record, and I won't put words in anybody's mouth. I'll just say that when I read the vote count, the two no's looked like the two guys at a group dinner who suggest maybe not ordering the third round of $19 margaritas. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they're just cheap. Either way somebody should have said it out loud.

Total Due

I don't know yet. That's the honest answer. October will tell me, and October has never once been gentle about anything except the weather.

I'll pay it. I always do. I'll grumble in the parking lot of the tax office, or more likely at my kitchen table with a website open, and then I'll go swim at a city pool that costs less than a parking spot downtown and float on my back and think: fine. This part, fine.

That's the deal with this town, the one I keep signing even when I'm out of the room for it. I'll keep showing up and paying in. In exchange, I'd like to be able to find what I paid for, ride it, swim in it, check it out for three weeks and return it late.

And next year I'm taking my vacation in July.