Your reassessment letter showed up this week. The number went up. Your county taxes go up with it. Your city taxes go up with it. That is not an accident of the calendar. That is the system working exactly the way the people in charge want it to work.
Tullahoma raised your property taxes last year. They looked you in the face and told you what the money was for. Roads. A fund for a new city hall. They went so far as to pass a resolution to send a charter amendment to the state locking in a minimum road spend every year, because they knew you would not trust them otherwise.
They were right. You should not have trusted them.
The charter amendment never went to the state. The roads never got the money. The city hall fund is not what they said it would be. The promise was a sales pitch. The tax increase was the only part they actually delivered.
Here is what they did with your money instead.
They poured it into an airport that has bled more than $750,000 in taxpayer losses. When the failure became impossible to hide, Mayor Sebourn did not fix the board responsible for it. He built a steering committee stacked with people who have a personal stake in keeping the airport propped up, and let them call it reform. The same governing body is still there. The same losses are still on the books. And now the mayor wants to hand the airport another $150,000-plus this year, plus $600,000 more for a new maintenance facility.
That is not a budget. That is a shell game.
Then they came for the Comprehensive Land Use Plan. The board voted to repeal it. The city attorney said it plainly: repealing the ordinance means the city does not have to follow it. That was the whole point. Kill the binding plan, clear the path for whatever developer gets the next handshake, and let the taxpayers cover the cost of growth they never asked for.
So look at what just happened to you. The county raised your assessment. Your bill goes up automatically. The city is sitting on a tax hike they already collected on a promise they already broke. And the same board that lied about the roads is preparing a budget that funnels more money into the airport, into a maintenance building, and into a planning vacuum custom-built for outside interests.
You are not imagining the anger. You are doing the math correctly.
This is not a disagreement over priorities. This is a governing body that asked for your trust, took your money, spent it on something else, and is counting on you to be too tired to notice. They are counting on the assessment letter doing the work for them. They are counting on you blaming the county. They are counting on you giving up.
They told you it was for the roads. The roads are still waiting. The airport is not.
The next budget vote is the bill. Make them sign their names to it.