The Texas County Information Project

TAC's County Information Project (CIP) is a central clearinghouse for county-related information. Partnerships with the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the Texas State Data Center and other agencies provide much of the raw data, which CIP then turns into comprehensible information.

CIP regularly answers questions using data on hand, such as "what counties are comparable to mine based upon population, geographic size, tax rates, etc.?" A large part of this information is available on TAC's web site (Basic Data). The CIP can also prepare custom reports and maps at the request of county officials, the legislature, state and federal agencies, and individuals.

County Expenditures Survey 2009. This is a blank 2009 survey form in PDF format.

We recently sent out a Commissioners Court Survey to all the counties. There have been several good questions received about the survey so we are posting them here along with the answers. But first, For any question, if you feel that the numbers requested don't tell the whole story then please feel free to include an explanation in the margin.

For question 1, the instructions say to exclude component units, proprietary units, debt service funds and grants. Should shouldn't we also exclude capital projects as well since they are mostly paid for from bonds?

No, please include capital projects. First, because we want to get comparable numbers from each county which would not happen if some exclude capital projects. Second, since bonds fall into the Interest and Sinking portion of the rollback rate calculation rather than Maintenance and Operation, they really shouldn't impact the calculation of revenue shortfall. However, if you feel that this will make your data appear odd in some manner, do please include an explanation in the margin so we can respond to any questions about the data.

For question 4, what is included in Road and Bridge Maintenance and Construction?

For a guide, use the Texas County Lateral Road and Bridge Expenditures Yearly Report. But, note that we're looking for expenditures for more than just lateral road expenditures; this form is just a guide.

For question 4, what is included in Courts?

Include county courts, district courts (county's portion), JP courts, juvenile courts. See Chapter 3 of the Uniform Chart of Accounts for Texas Counties for more information.

For question 5, property taxes were only a portion of our total budget. How do we figure a shortfall in the budget?

Assume that there is/was no change in all other revenue sources. First example, if you were expecting a property tax levy of $1.5 million as part of a $2.5 million budget, and the calculations for question 5 show that the maximum proprty tax levy under a 5% rollback rate would have been $1.35 million, then there would have been a shortfall of $150,000 for that year ($1.5 million minus $1.35 million).

Second example, if, with the same original property tax levy of $1.5 million and total budget of $2.5 million, you determine that the maximum proprty tax levy under a 5% rollback rate would have been $1.52 million, then there would have been no shortfall. As a result you would then enter $0 for that year.

New Items

The 2007 tax data is now available. See the County Property Taxes section of our CIP Product's page for information on 2007 county property taxes.

County Expenditures Survey Report 2008. Results of TAC's 2008 survey on selected county expenditures, in PDF format.

2008 Salary Survey. TAC's survey of county officials' salaries is now available on-line. This is the entire 3.0 MB PDF document showing salaries for all elected county officials and the county Auditors. This document has been corrected since publication; all errata are being published on-line at the CIP's Financial Data page.

See the County Property Taxes section of our CIP Products page for more information on county property taxes.

CIP Projects and Initiatives
For more information on the various CIP projects and initiatives, see our Projects page.

The Texas County Data pages are brought to you by the County Information Project.

• Bruce Barr, County/GIS Analyst
• Paul Emerson, State Financial Analyst
• Tim Brown, Senior Analyst