The city of Ypsilanti as well as the Washenaw Intermediate School District both had ballot proposals for 2.0 increases in taxation. Both failed.
I'm not going to try to explain why these millages failed, but I think there is a misunderstanding about what, and how much, a millage affects people.
A mill is 1/1000 of a dollar. It's not a lot of money. If you had an income tax of 1 mill on your income, that would mean that for every $1000 you earn, you give $1 to the government. If the government demanded a 2 mill increase on this purely hypothetical income tax, you would see a 300% increase in your tax level, and pay $3 instead of one.
A 300% increase in taxation sounds bad. A $2 increase per $1000..., well, if the government wanted so little money to begin with we probably wouldn't mind too much. As an aside, this example also illustrates why we need to be wary of people quoting percentage increases at us. A 300% tax increase! Oh, my stars and garters!
However, millages are not used for income taxes. Millages are usually used to pay for local government services, libraries, and schools. Millages are also almost invariable tied to property. In fact, millages are the primary source of the property taxes every homeowner in a municipality pays. Depending on the municipality, millages can be pretty high, or almost nothing. Usually, within a municipality the largest millage is for schools.
However, before we can do any calculations, we need to discuss property value. There are three values assigned to any piece of property in Michigan: the real value, what the home can sell for; the assessed value, in Michigan this is half the real value; and the State Equalized Value, brought to you by Proposition A back in 1995. What Proposition A did was limit the taxable value of the home, called the State Equalized Value (SEV), from rising as fast as the assessed value did. In other words, if you bought a house in Brighton in 1980 for $40,000, in the early 1990's when Brighton was an expanding community the real value may have risen to $200,000. Which means the assessed value was no longer 1/2 of the price you paid for it, or $20,000, but five times that amount $100,000. If you were expecting to pay property taxes on $20,000 and your property taxes went up 5 times the amount in a few short years, you may not have the money to pay. So Proposition A and the SEV was brought in to limit the taxable value of a home to no more than 3% a year until the SEV caught up to the assessed value (1/2 the real value).
BTW, this accounts for the "Bump" that people are upset about when they purchase a home. The previous owners may be paying on an SEV of say $70,000 (assessed value $140,000, and real value $240,000) on their home. When a house is purchased everything resets. If you purchase the home for it's real value, $240,000, (assessed value $140,000 and SEV now $140,000) your taxes are going to be twice what the previous owner paid, Ouch!
Now millages are property taxes against the SEV. Which is, at most, is 1/2 of the real value of your home. In many cases it's less.
So, let's say you have just purchased a $100,000 home in Ypsilanti. It's not a great place, but it's what you can afford. A millage is proposed to help pay for police protection. It's a 2 mill increase. How much is that going to cost you?
Real value of the property is $100,000.
Assessed value is $50,000.
State Equalized Value is $50,000.
Cost of increased police tax per year = 0.002 * $50,000 = $100.
The residents of Ypsilanti were unwilling to pay an additional $8.33/month/household to pay for their law enforcement. That's about the cost of one meal at a fast food restaurant per month.
Now, certainly if you just bought a $200,000 house, that's $200/yr; a house valued at $300,000 would pay $300/yr, etc.
There are other reasons for rejecting a millage, and I can't say that the citizens of Ypsilanti made a mistake in rejecting this one. The results of this millage are yet to be seen. Yet, if the reason most people had for voting against this millage was because it cost too much, I don't think they realize how little it actually would have cost.
