Every working-class family in Carrollton, Texas, knows what it feels like to stretch a dollar in an era of crushing inflation. Unfortunately, the politicians sitting inside Carrollton City Hall do not seem to share that financial discipline. Rather than tightening the municipal belt, local officials have chosen to embark on a massive spending spree, leveraging rising property valuations and new utility fees to extract even more wealth from the private sector.
On September 1, 2026, the Carrollton City Council officially adopted its Fiscal Year 2027 Operating and Capital Budget. This bloated municipal budget totals a staggering $356.57 million, representing a massive 9.39 percent increase from the prior fiscal year. To fund this rapid expansion of local government, the city council set an ad valorem property tax rate of $0.5375 per $100 of valuation. While city officials have tried to market this as a nominal rate reduction, the reality is that they deliberately set the rate far above the no-new-revenue rate of $0.507, creating an effective tax hike that increases the financial burden on local homeowners.
But the wealth extraction does not stop at the property tax bill. During the same September 1, 2026 meeting, the city council also approved the implementation of a new monthly Stormwater Utility fee. Instead of funding essential municipal infrastructure out of the city's existing, multimillion-dollar general revenues, the council chose to tack on this recurring utility fee to generate a permanent new stream of taxpayer cash that bypasses traditional property tax caps and state-mandated voter approval requirements.
From a classical liberal perspective, this fiscal maneuver is a classic example of hidden taxation. Free-market advocacy organizations like the Texas Public Policy Foundation have long warned that local governments use rising home appraisals to quietly increase their budgets without officially claiming a rate hike. By failing to adopt the no-new-revenue rate, Carrollton officials are capitalizing on inflation to grow the size of government at the expense of private citizens, undermining economic freedom and property rights across the community.
Carrollton taxpayers deserve transparency and fiscal responsibility, not budget sleight-of-hand and new utility fees designed to fund an ever-expanding local bureaucracy. It is time for local residents to hold their city council members accountable and demand that they stop using rising appraisals as a backdoor mechanism to plunder the private sector.