This is not the title to a bad breakup ballad. What it is, is a song of Baltimore City?s decline. Each year the future dims as more and more taxpaying businesses move out; more and more move in exempt from property taxes.
The latest Maryland Nonprofit Employment Update from Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies confirms this trend, as do city Finance Department numbers. According to the study, released last week, nonprofit jobs account for almost one-third of the total private jobs in the city. That percentage keeps creeping higher. Since 2002, nonprofits have added new jobs while the private sector has shed them.
We do not bemoan the talent places like Johns Hopkins? multiple institutions, some of the biggest employers in Baltimore, bring to the city. We welcome it. And the state and city welcome the income taxes those jobs bring, and the property taxes their employees who live in the city pay. But Baltimore cannot afford to subsidize anyone else without bringing in new businesses that pay property taxes.
The city lost 2,443 taxable properties since 2000 ? or close to a property a day ? while the number of tax-exempt properties rose 46 percent to 19,042.
It also regularly gives major tax breaks to developers who say it?s not economically feasible to build in a city with rates more than twice as high as the rest of the state. They are right. But that leaves the only people left to finance city operations, scheduled to cost 10.4 percent more next year, the shrinking number of businesses and homeowners. Asking them to pay more is criminal ? especially in these economic times.
The latest national figures show the economy lost 62,000 jobs ? 91,000 in the private sector ? in June. The only growth was 29,000 government jobs, meaning fewer taxpayers must finance more government as they are less able to pay for it.
If Mayor Sheila Dixon wants to turn this city around, she needs to lower property taxes now. That solution turned San Francisco from a wasteland in 1978 to a city with a growing population and budget surplus only four years later. The decision is hers. The longer she waits to cut property taxes, the less likely the renaissance she so desires will happen under her watch.
