Beginning on July 1, 2005, RBS residents will pay an extra .08 cents on the dollar in property tax. That means, if your property is assessed at $43,000, the average assessment on RBS residences, you paid $141.50 in property taxes last year, based on a tax rate of $1.32 per one hundred dollars of assessed value. Your tax this year on the same property and assessed at the same value will be $150.50, based on the rate of $1.40 per hundred dollars of assessed property value.

Despite former Mayor Gregory's staunch fight against raising the property tax, the RBS City Council voted on final reading at their regularly scheduled City Council meeting on May 12, 2005 to raise the property tax from $1.32 to $1.40. Urged by Councilman Jimmy Roark to raise the tax, council members and new City Mayor Kenneth Hollis with little discussion approved the tax hike, citing the need for additional funds. They raised the tax rate despite learning from City Clerk Coby Knight that the increase would do little to make up the $60,000 deficit in the City's General Funds budget. Council members cited the 'City's proposed annexation plan and the tax money it could bring if successfully executed as a way to meet the budget deficit.

However, except for the official Urban Growth Plan which was prepared for the City in 1999 by state planners from the Department of Economic and Community Development, which the Council hopes to augment by extending areas able to be annexed to the City, the City has no annexation plan at this point, at least, not one that has been produced for the Council . The responsibility for producing a new plan showing areas the Council wants to annex, has yet to be presented and at least two of the members of the Annexation Committee, created last Fall by former Mayor Gregory, are no longer on the City Council.

The ability of the Council to successfully annex property outside of the boundaries designated in the official Urban Growth Plan, including the much discussed property adjacent to the Nestle Waters bottling plant and the property on which it sits, will depend on the Council