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Southern Florida is feeling it now, soon many other regions are going to be  having to face another dangerous entity. The local governments and their taxing authorities. An honest person would think that in  the  face of 60 percent appreciation in real estate values, taxes would correspondingly go down as a portion of the property assessment. But then that would be an  honest person.

But the reality is that the politician will try to suck every penny out of the community and into their coffers. They will start building roads, developing parks (named after  themselves, of course), and hiring every cousin and friend they can. Because in politics money is power.

So for all of you who live  in these regions, if you do not get organized quickly, your friendly government official is going to start spending like a madman. And if appraisals go down, you will have your taxes raised to cover the infrastructure they have built.

Only the county, Cooper City, Parkland and Hillsboro Beach plan to limit increases in their tax collections to less than 10 percent. The rest are seeking more to pay for everything from extra police officers to higher pension costs.

The newspaper analysis found that Broward’s unprecedented, five-year real estate boom will have pumped an extra $1.4 billion into local government accounts after this year’s increases.

The taxable value of Broward property shot up 60 percent since 2001, not counting new construction. That means local governments could have cut tax rates by double-digit percentages each year and still collected as much as they did before the boom. via the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

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