Bethel Park increases taxes on real estate, earned income

As the longtime president of Bethel Park Council, Tim Moury has worked on municipal budgets each year going back to the 1990s.

His final effort in that regard comes with a tough choice: raising the real estate tax rate by .75 mills and the municipal portion of the tax on earned income and net profits by .1% for 2024.

“We spent a lot of time going over the budget. Could we have made it a little less and cut services? Yeah, we probably could have,” Moury, who decided not to seek another term, said during council’s Nov. 13 meeting. “But we would have only mortgaged our future.”

Council voted unanimously to approve the tax increases while adopting a $30.75 million spending plan for general operating expenses in 2024. The current year’s budget lists the total at $29.83 million.

The new real estate tax rate is 3.53 mills, of which .34 mills is dedicated to the Bethel Park Volunteer Fire Company. For the owner of a property valued at $149,300, the median for the municipality as listed by Allegheny County, the tax bill will be $527.03, up $111.98 over this year.

The earned income/net profits tax rises to 1.5%, with .5% going to Bethel Park School District.

Dr. Timothy Campbell, another council member who did not run for reelection, explained some of the circumstances leading to the increases.

“We’ve seen double-digit increases in inflation. That affects everything from our paper clips to paper products to grass seed to salt trucks to police vehicles. It affects the cost of asphalt. It affects tremendously even things like utility bills that we’ve had to do — drywall, for goodness sake,” Campbell said. “We’ve also seen a 9.75 (percent) increase in a lot of our health care costs. And that’s only been manifested, really, in the last six months.”

A new five-year contract with garbage and recycling collector Waste Management, as negotiated for multiple municipalities through the South Hills Area Council of Governments, means a 56% cost increase for Bethel Park in 2024, according to Campbell.

“We’ve cut every extra, superfluous expense we possibly could,” he said. “We froze and we postponed a lot of the capital projects that we would have liked to have done. Yet we still have to plow and pave the roads. We still need to keep the streetlights on. We still need to maintain the parks.”

On the revenue side, Bethel Park is subject to a substantial decrease with regard to a major property it shares with neighboring Upper St. Clair.

“We had a tax assessment appeal at South Hills Village, which is one of our largest taxing bodies, and we were forced to give back about $230,000 for the last four years,” Moury said.

He discussed measures taken to reduce municipal expenses.

“There have been some reductions in staff. There have been some reassignments of duties. So we’ve kind of looked at everything from top to bottom on where the efficiencies are, where we can be effective in cutting them,” he said. “But we’re down to whether we cut services significantly or adjust our revenues accordingly.”

For Allegheny County municipalities adjacent to Bethel Park, 2023 real estate tax rates are: Baldwin Borough, 6.78 mills; Castle Shannon, 9.658; Mt. Lebanon, 4.91; South Park Township, 3.062; Upper St. Clair, 3.83 mills; and Whitehall, 4.4200.

The rates in neighboring Washington County townships are Peters, 1.7 mills, and Union, 1.184.