Reading City Council Approves Budget, Tax Hikes

Editor’s note:  For those folks in Pottstown, please note that Reading is 4 times as large as Pottstown, yet their budget is only twice as big.

City Council on Monday adopted a $77 million budget for 2013, as well as the increases in property, local earned income and commuter taxes needed to make it work.

• The property tax will rise by 9.45 percent, or 1.355 mills, to a total of 15.689 mills.  An owner with a property assessed at $50,000 will pay an extra $67.75.

• The local earned income tax on city residents will rise by 0.2 percentage points to 3.6 percent.  That rate includes the Reading School District‘s share.

• And the commuter tax will rise by the same 0.2 points, to 0.3 percent.

Read more:  http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=431486

Reading Officials Push For Increases In Taxes On Workers

Meeting today in talks to close a $5.7 million gap in the 2013 budget, the city administration and City Council urged the consultants who oversee Reading’s finances to reconsider their ban on raising local earned-income and commuter taxes.

A 1947 topographic map of the Reading, Pennsylvania area. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“I don’t see how we can survive we don’t get that revenue,” Councilman Jeffrey S. Waltman Sr. said.

The city’s Act 47 financial recovery plan, written by the state-paid consultants and adopted by the city in 2010, calls for the earned-income tax on residents to remain at 1.9 percent in 2013.

It also calls for the earned-income tax on suburbanites working in the city, the commuter tax, to remain at 0.1 percent next year.

Read more: http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=419224