Ivins • Already faced with inflationary pressures from the rising cost of housing, gas and groceries, residents of this southern Utah city will now have to fork over more for property taxes.
After listening to residents weigh in at a public hearing Thursday — most of whom were opposed to paying more — Ivins City Council members voted 4-1 to approve a nearly 34% property tax hike. Kevin Smith was the lone council member to vote “no.”
The tax increase, the only increase imposed this year by a Washington County city, is aimed at eliminating a $540,000 budgetary shortfall in the fiscal year 2026 budget and restoring the dollars lost due to inflation since 2010, the last time the city increased the tax.
Utah’s Truth-in-Taxation law requires property tax rates to automatically adjust when property values change so that the tax a government entity collects remains the same. Over the past 15 years, city officials noted during the hearing, the property tax dollars the city collects have lost roughly 53% of their value while the cost of virtually everything the city provides — jobs, services, and materials for maintaining parks and fixing roads and pipes — has gone up.
“What business can sustain itself on a fixed revenue for 15 years?” Mayor Chris Hart asked. “It is simply unsustainable.”
Further exacerbating matters, elected officials noted, the city’s population has grown by about 61%, and residents are demanding and expecting more and better services. In response, Ivins Finance Director Cade Visser said, the city has professionalized what had been a largely volunteer fire department in recent years and now has two police patrols on city streets around the clock.
“We have increased our level of service, increasing our costs and hopefully making the city a safer place and providing a better benefit,” Visser said.
As outlined by the mayor and council, the property tax hike will increase the city’s portion of the tax on a $743,000 home by roughly $122 a year. Property taxes on a $743,000 commercial property would jump by roughly $220.
That is too much for Nicole Graf, co-owner of Hidden Springs RV Resort, which opened last September just off Highway 91.
“We are less than a year into operations,” she said, “working to build our customer base and recoup our substantial start-up costs. A 33% increase on top of the already steep prices in my county property taxes will push our operating costs to an unsustainable level. Unlike larger established businesses, we don’t have the margins to absorb the increase without passing it on to visitors.”
Alternatives to a property tax hike that opponents advanced at Thursday’s hearing included focusing on needs rather than wants, learning to make do with less and using more volunteers. Others argued the city should hold off until sales and room taxes roll in from Black Desert, the $2 billion Ivins mega-resort that is open but remains under construction.
Visser said the tax revenue the city has collected from Black Desert thus far have for the current fiscal year have fallen far short of expectations.
“We were hoping to get $300,000 worth of transient room tax, but were going to [collect] close to $120,000,” Visser said. “So my expectations were off … I was too bullish.”
Hart and others estimate Black Desert revenues might not do much for municipal coffers until it is more fully built out, about 2029 or 2030. Even then, the mayor remarked, it would be a mistake to assume revenues from the resort would negate the need for additional tax revenues.
The council’s approval of the tax hike paves the way for the city to hire four more staff, an animal control officer, two park maintenance workers and a storm drain coordinator. It will also be used to fund a $4 per-hour raise for sworn police officers, purchase four new police vehicles to update the city’s aging fleet, construct a fence at the municipal cemetery and save for future capital expenditures.