Winter Park holds millage rate

The Winter Park City Commission voted unanimously on Monday to hold the line on the city’s millage rate for the upcoming fiscal year, despite property values increasing and raising the city’s property tax revenue by 2.17 percent.

The operating millage rate established each year by the city remains at 4.0923 mills for the sixth year in a row, continuing the trend that began in 2008.

Residents will pay more taxes due to the increasing value of properties, but Commissioners insisted on keeping the millage the same.

“Our nation’s economy – even though it’s getting better – isn’t such where people can just be paying more and more in taxes, so we try to be very effective and efficient with our millage rates and what we charge,” Mayor Ken Bradley said.

“The millage rates are being kept at what I think is very competitive.”

City Manager Randy Knight said that the current millage rate remains competitive on a local level, ranking as the third lowest rate in Orange County.

“I think it shows a real strong commitment on the part of the City Commission to strive to keep the same level of service without having to raise the rate, especially during the down economy we’ve gone through,” Knight said.

The City Commission also approved the annual budget for the next fiscal year, which saw few significant changes from this year’s budget. The most significant shift in funds took place last month when the City Commission voted to allocate $250,000 from the city’s operating contingency fund to the tree removal and pruning fund, addressing a longstanding need to cut down old trees throughout the city.

Commissioner Steven Leary noted the importance of having an efficient budget and tweaking it enough to get the most services possible.

“We have some businesspeople on this Commission who understand efficiency,” Leary said. “We’ve worked with tremendous city staff to try to squeeze as many efficiencies as we can out of all their operations.”

“We look at all of these things very seriously.”

Leary said that keeping an efficient budget and establishing more businesses within the city to help pick up the cost only benefits future residents in Winter Park.

“We’ve been very good at managing the efficiencies of our current budget and we’ve also been very good over the past couple years at increasing our commercial tax base,” Leary said. “That’s going to help my kids; that’s going to help families coming in here to live way down the road.”