A painful promise for us to keep—supporting the city's $424 million bond package. But Garland absolutely must have it, so we support it.

Despite huge tax increases due to DCAD's reappraisals, we continue to support the city's bond election, however painful that's going to be for us.

Like many Garland property owners, I opened our letters from the Dallas County Tax Appraisal Office this year with much trepidation.

I knew tax appraisals would be going up. I was expecting ours to rise also. Neighbors living in nearby areas had told me horror stories about how high their reappraisals were last year. I also follow such trends very carefully in the public media.

Was I expecting to see the tax appraisal on our personal home nearly double in this year's tax reappraisal? No. Only in my nightmares. Fortunately, of course, we are both over 65, so our taxes for our personal residence are somewhat capped at a lower value.

Except for one commercial lot in central Garland (whose tax valuation, oddly, stayed the same), all our other Garland properties were up at least 50 percent; most were like our personal residence and up nearly double. Those taxes will go up immediately with no restraints whatsoever—no homestead exemptions, no over-65 exemptions, no legislative measures to protect us. Only one's personal home is eligible for exemptions and protections.

What this means in plain English is that our combined city, county, and school district tax bills will jump dramatically next year. I'm talking thousands of dollars, not nickels and dimes. Since I don't like to raise the rent for excellent tenants (which all of ours are, because we go to excessive lengths to maintain our properties), I'm now left with the choice between personally swallowing a huge tax increase or raising rents all the way around—or finding some middle ground in between.

And all this is occurring as Garland marches toward its upcoming $424-million bond election, which will raise our taxes even higher.

I tell you all this to simply say, the dramatic increase in our tax bills from the reappraisals has given us cause to look again at all the items on the $424-million bond proposal on the May 4 ballot.

After receiving their letters from DCAD this spring, friends and neighbors are also asking lots of questions and closely scrutinizing the bond proposal and how it will impact them, too. Politicians meanwhile are doing their usual: hiding behind (and pointing fingers at) DCAD and the huge tax hike it is handing all the governmental entities in our area—as if they have no control whatsoever over what is happening.

If everyone in town received the same steep property tax increases we did (which some already have and others eventually will), the city, county and school district will reap a huge windfall in new money for their coffers.

Will that windfall be enough to offset the need for the city's new bonds?

My answer is an emphatic "no"! Garland has so many needs right now, both the steep increase in taxes from the reappraisals and the tax increases from the bond proposals will not do all that is needed to get this city to where it needs to be. After 15 years of no new bond election and the city's foot-dragging and reluctance to spend all of the money approved in the 2004 bond election, our needs are legion. Remember, the citizens study committee on the bond listed more than $1.1-billion in needs. And that was not an exhaustive list but one pulled together somewhat in haste, with parks and libraries incomplete.

Will the windfall the city is reaping from the reappraisals be enough to reverse our personal support for the bond election? Dampen, perhaps, but not change our support for the new bonds!

Why? This question is not new for us to answer. We've been asked questions like this for decades ever since we opted to become "urban pioneers" in the traditionally historic residential part of downtown Garland. Even family members shook their heads and wondered aloud why we were staying put in "old" Garland, which they considered a dangerous and declining area like much of south Garland.

We live and see firsthand the neglect of streets, parks, and other aspects of the city.

We live and see the neglect of streets, parks and other aspects of the city daily. Potholes are only the tip of the iceberg of what needs to be addressed..

After all, anyone who knows us well is aware that we have multiple options and choices for where to live. Unlike some, we are not "stuck" in Garland. We can live just about wherever we please. Being a native Houstonian, that city always beckons, but re-settling in Houston is in third place next to southern Oklahoma, where my Chickasaw elder benefits would increase by living within traditional tribal boundaries. Arizona where we already own two properties is a strong fourth option. Those are only the most obvious choices.

Kay is not only a native Garlandite with deep roots here, we both love Garland, so this city for multiple reasons is the most logical choice for us.

In our pursuit of a free-enterprise redevelopment of our small portion of historic downtown, I've had to turn aside from two stockbrokers and two bankers who tried to convince me Garland is not worth the risk. We believe it is. But, truthfully, it has been painfully slower and more difficult than we ever thought it would be when we returned to my wife's hometown nearly 20 years ago to care for aging relatives and "retire" from active employment. By now, fast approaching 2020, we expected all of downtown Garland (bounded by Garland Road, Walnut, West Avenue D, and First Street) to be flourishing much more than it is now.

The slow change in downtown and the city's failure to crack down seriously on slum-like conditions including illegal drugs and apparent prostitution in our own neighborhood presented us with the challenge: either to stick our heads in the sand and suffer the consequences, move, or buy up surrounding properties. Our last acquisition required four dumpster loads and about $5,000 just to clean out the filth and muck. And an additional $5,500 to rewire that whole house, which Garland Code Endorsement and Building Inspections and every electrician that inspected the place said was a ticking time bomb for a raging fire that under the right conditions could have taken out our home too—and maybe our lives.

We will support the bond package because Garland needs every item on the bond issue if the city is to have any hope of keeping up with the rest of the northeast DFW suburbs, which are experiencing a dramatic explosion in growth and wealth. These are crucial days in which Garland must keep moving forward and not slip backward. Otherwise, we will continue to deal with the painful stereotype of being a poor and under-educated community. (Unfortunately those realities were well documented in the bond study committee's reports, particularly the frank, honest, and superior analysis by the city's Library Board. We've got to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and stop the pretense that everything is fine in Garland as is when indeed it is not. Then we have to pull together—ALL of us—to set the city on the right path forward to prosperity for ALL.

Kay and I are heavily invested financially, emotionally, mentally, and physically in Garland because we believe in this city and want to see it march forward into a brighter future. We've been wanting that for two decades now. If the city continues dragging its heels on fixing and upgrading its streets, parks, drainage, and other infrastructure as it has for the past 15 years, it may never recover. (And the lame excuse about "Oh, the Great Recession" isn't holding back other DFW Metroplex cities or other cities across the nation that suffered during that deep recession, which officially ended in June 2009, far worse than we did.)

The "surprises" here since we purchased our personal residence in downtown Garland in 1999 have been legion. To name just a few:

1. The slow redevelopment of the Central Downtown business area for the first decade we lived here was appalling.

2. The tendency of some city political leaders to put on Pollyanna, false faces instead of confronting reality has been discouraging.

3. The past immature turf-and-political-and-personality battles among the members of Garland city council, which has slowed redevelopment and added to Garland's poor image, have been majorly disappointing.

4. The failure of the city to plan on a grand scale like Plano and Frisco have (instead of in tiny baby steps like Garland tends to do) has seemed futile.

5. And the fickleness of some of our Garland banks and other financial institutions to commit to the cause of building a better Garland has been, well, frankly disgusting.

"It's not wise to buy so much real estate in such a small area," one area banker commented several years ago. We soon took our business elsewhere.

"Do you REALLY believe those businesses on the (Garland) Square are making any profit?" queried another banker, who acted as if he knew something I didn't. We sought another source with a firm commitment to downtown Garland for our banking needs.

"Diversify, diversify, diversity," screamed our former stockbrokers—eyeing what they thought was too much investment in Garland's historic downtown area.

More than a decade ago, one self-serving local stockbroker even did a hilarious "review" of our finances, showing only stocks and bonds as increasing in value—and the values of our personal home and other properties not only in Garland but elsewhere too—as well as foreseeing the rental income from them—staying static over the next 30 years.  He, too, soon was toast.

Yes, we do believe Garland is worth it! We prove it not only by our words but by our actions, too.

We have not lost faith in this community—though I will candidly admit that in my weaker moments, sometimes it has been tempting to hoist the white flag, admit this still isn't the community we hoped it would be and never can be, and move elsewhere. We still want a better community for ALL Garland citizens. We still believe it is possible. And we still intend to work toward that goal.

With next-door neighbor Richardson drawing more multi-billion-dollar, jobs-generating operations, Plano to our north and northwest expanding economically at eye-popping speeds, Rowlett to our east building rapidly and beautifully along its large shoreline, and Dallas' massive economic boom and expanding rejuvenation and renovation at what seems like the warp speed, the stakes for Garland have never been higher than they are right now.

At the same time we continue to believe Garland will never succeed until it comes to terms pragmatically with its vast racial, ethnic, and religious diversity. Finding a way to mobilize those resources each community brings to the table instead of running from them or creating a false facade utilizing a few representatives is a major key to Garland's future success.

So, yes, even though we personally are going to pay a stiff price for it (on top of the horrible increase in our property taxes already), Kay and I stand behind our statements earlier that we  support the bond proposals—every one of them.

At our house a promise made is a promise kept—even if it is a costly one. And we already know this one will be!

 

Paying city taxes will be more painful for us because of the reappraisals and the bond election, but we still support the city's $424 million bond proposal.