Baytown held its tax rate flat and set it 1.88 percent above no-new-revenue. The city's recap prints only one of those numbers.

Baytown City Council adopted a 2026 property tax rate of $0.69803 per $100 on September 10, the same rate it set last year. The no-new-revenue rate was $0.68517, and the city’s own recap of that meeting never prints it.

Why it matters

A flat rate is not a flat bill. Baytown’s tax notice puts the increase in taxable value at 3.39 percent, so a home that rose with the average pays about 3.4 percent more this year at the identical rate.

Baytown sits mostly in Harris County, and this is the same arithmetic playing out at the county, at the flood district and at the emergency services districts this month. The rate holds, the appraisal moves, and the bill goes up.

By the numbers

$0.69803 per $100 of valuation, adopted September 10. Identical to the 2025 rate.
$0.43812 maintenance and operations plus $0.25991 debt service. Those add to the adopted rate exactly.
$0.68517 no-new-revenue rate. The adopted rate is 1.88 percent above it.
$0.74695 voter-approval rate. The adopted rate is 6.55 percent below it, so no election is triggered.
3.39 percent, the increase in taxable value stated in the city’s notice.
$1,396.06 a year to the city on a home with $200,000 in taxable value. At no-new-revenue it would be $1,370.34. The gap is $25.72.
$149.4 million in FY2027 General Fund revenue against $144.9 million in operating expenditures, a difference of $4.5 million.
$135.9 million was the FY2026 General Fund operating budget in the city’s September 2025 release. The new figure is about 6.6 percent higher.

What the coverage buried

This one is an audit of the city’s own account of the meeting, because the local paper’s story on it could not be retrieved.

Baytown’s recap gives the adopted rate and splits it into maintenance and operations and debt service. It stops there. The no-new-revenue rate is published by the same city, on its own website, on the tax notice page. Leaving $0.68517 out of a public recap of a tax vote turns “same rate as last year” into a statement a reader will hear as “no increase,” which is not what happened to the levy.

The recap also prints $149.4 million in General Fund revenue against $144.9 million in operating expenditures without saying what the $4.5 million difference is for. Transfers to other funds and capital are the ordinary answers. The document does not give either one, and until it does, a resident cannot tell whether the city set a rate above no-new-revenue to fund operations or to fund something the recap did not name.

The other side

Holding a rate at $0.69803 for a second straight year is restraint by the measure most cities are judged on, and Baytown landed 6.55 percent under the voter-approval rate when it could have gone higher without asking anyone. Debt service is $0.25991 of the rate, better than a third of it, and debt service is largely bonds already approved and already owed. A rate 1.88 percent above no-new-revenue is a small number by any standard, and $25.72 on a $200,000 home is not the thing straining a household budget.

All of that is true and none of it argues for omission. The city can make every one of those points and still print $0.68517 next to $0.69803. Publishing the comparison costs the city nothing it should mind losing.

What to watch

October 1, when the FY2027 budget takes effect.
Whether the city publishes water, sewer and solid waste rates for FY2027, and what they do. The September 10 recap does not mention utility rates at all.
Whether the $4.5 million gap between General Fund revenue and operating expenditures shows up in the adopted budget document as transfers, capital or reserve.
Harris County’s own rate vote and the emergency services district rates, which land on many of the same Baytown bills.

Bottom line

Baytown did not raise its tax rate and it did not need an election. It also set a rate above no-new-revenue in a year values rose 3.39 percent, and it told residents about the first two facts and not the third. The number a homeowner needs is the one the city left out.

Sources

Editorial