Commercial Property Assessments by Rhode Island Municipality, Plus PILOT Payments

Furthering the discussion from both Justin's post on Providence and Brown University, and my post from last week on commercial and industrial property values in Rhode Island municipalities, bear in mind that Providence is already receiving state support, nominally related to some of its tax-exempt properties. Providence receives on the order of $20 million per year in state funds through the PILOT program, described in the state budget as follows...

Legislation creating this program requires the State of Rhode Island to reimburse cities and towns for property taxes that would have been due on certain types of real property that are exempted from taxation by state law. This includes property owned by nonprofit educational institutions, nonprofit hospitals, or any state owned hospital, veteran’s facility, or correctional facility.

Cranston received about $4 million per year from this program in fiscal year 2011 and no other Rhode Island community received more than $1 million in FY2011.

Given the City of Providence's commercial tax rates, the $19 million dollar PILOT subsidy is equivalent to being able to tax about a half billion dollars worth of additional commercial property.

For every RI city and town, the additional commercial property assessment that would have been needed to generate their PILOT subsidies can be calculated...

...and added to the actual commercial/industrial tax base, to yield an "effective" commercial/industrial tax base for each community.

With PILOT funds taken into consideration, Providence rises to near the top of the list of Rhode Island's urban areas, roughly tying East Providence, when ranked in terms of an effective tax base on a per-resident basis. (And note that using local commercial tax rates skews the results to Providence's advantage, since an equivalent subsidy will translate to less taxable value in a high-tax community compared to a lower-tax one)...

The list once again unavoidably brings us to the question that the urban chauvinists refuse to consider: Is there any real justification for demanding that significantly more non-residential "value", for taxation or for other in purposes, be available to Providence than to other densely populated Rhode Island communities like Pawtucket, Cranston or North Providence?

Indeed, if you forgo the assumption that the most populous place is a region must automatically become the place where everybody wants to go for everything, and then compare Providence to its surrounding communities, Providence seems to have done very well for a non-tourist urban area in terms of the amount of commercial property within the reach of its tax assessor. Certainly, in terms of commercial and industrial tax revenue collected, there are only a few places in Rhode Island doing better, at least in the short term. That will be the subject of the next chart...