Data: Manhattan's property tax rate puts it in the middle of pack with state's largest cities

In property tax rates, Manhattan is in the middle of the pack.

New data from the Kansas League of Municipalities puts Manhattan in 15th place out of 26 of the state’s largest cities. The current tax rate here is 150.404 mills; a mill is $1 in tax for every $1,000 in assessed, taxable property value. That figure includes the taxes levied by the city government, the county and the school district — the three big tax entities here and nearly everywhere else in Kansas.

The highest rate? In Parsons, where it’s 209.651 mills. The lowest is in Overland Park at 104.067. The Pottawatomie County portion of Manhattan would rank at No. 18; Manhattan is an odd duck in that the city limits include territory in two counties.

The tax rate here is at issue this year — as it is at this time every year — as local governments contemplate their budgets for the upcoming year. Elected officials have to approve the tax rate to bring in the money necessary to cover the budget.

How the tax rates affect individual property owners depends also on the appraised value of the property in question. The League of Municipalities’ data does not include the average appraised value of an existing single family home, so there’s no way to tell from that data set what the average homeowner’s bill would actually be. At The Mercury, and at our other publications, we try to take that into account so as to report what a tax proposal would mean for a property owner’s bill.

It’s reasonable to assume that the average value in, say, Overland Park is substantially higher than in Parsons, which means tax bills in OP actually could be higher even if the tax rate is lower. The government doesn’t have to charge as high a rate to bring in the same amount of money in a place with higher property values.

Although the League data does not include that information, there’s one way to get a sense of it: Calculating the per-capita value of the value of appraised property in the community. The highest in the state is in Leawood, where it’s $39,261; Parsons is, in fact, the lowest, at $6,105. Manhattan ranks eighth, just behind Lawrence, at $13,324. To reiterate, those numbers do not represent average property values; they represent the total value of all taxable property divided by the number of people living in the community.

To break down the tax rate into its components: Riley County ranks 87th out of the state’s 109 counties at 39.902 mills. The Manhattan-Ogden school district ranks 59th out of 286 districts. Manhattan ranks 7th out of 27 in terms of the property tax rate levied by the city government itself.

So the county is in the bottom quarter, while the school district and the city are in the top quarter. Overall it ends up in a middle-of-the pack rate paid by the taxpayer.