What the Reappraisal Did to Your Tax Bill

You have heard the county’s number: home values up 32 percent in the 2024 reappraisal. That is the countywide average for home values. It is not a tax figure, and it is not Garfield Heights.

Garfield Heights was not average

Our home values rose significantly more — about 51 percent as certified, among the largest jumps in the county. Ohio law is supposed to soften a jump like that. But most of our tax rate did not shrink with our values. In 2024 the city’s millage went up, the school bond and emergency levy rates stayed where they were, and school operating millage could fall only as far as the state’s 20-mill floor.

So the county’s residential tax rate for Garfield Heights fell only from 3.55 percent of market value to 3.31. For bills paid in 2025, that was the highest of the 81 tax districts on the county Treasurer’s rate chart. By my arithmetic from the county’s published rates, a home that rose by the city average saw the bill it paid in 2025 go up by roughly 40 percent.

What it has meant for families

That caused extreme hardship. I have sat at kitchen tables in this ward where families were choosing between medication, food and household necessities. Even before the 2025 bills, the CDC estimated about one in four adults in Garfield Heights faced food insecurity, compared with about one in six countywide. One Garfield Heights homeowner, 71 and on a fixed income, told Signal Cleveland in December 2024: “My income is so small that I might have to walk away after 35 years.”

In my view, a tax bill like that is not sustainable for families on fixed incomes, and it is costing us good neighbors and homeowners.

The strain shows at the courthouse, too

Eviction filings in the Garfield Heights Municipal Court — which also serves Maple Heights, Independence, Brecksville and four smaller villages — have topped the worst year of the 2007–2009 mortgage crisis in every year since 2011 except 2020, when evictions were paused during the pandemic. In 2023 they hit 1,289, the most of any year since at least 2005; 2025 came in at 1,116. These are filings, not completed evictions, and they cover the whole court district.

This year’s bills

This year’s bills came down: two school bond levies are no longer on the bill, the city’s police-and-fire charter millage came down on the county rate list, and the school emergency levy was renewed at a lower millage for the same $5.35 million a year. But this year’s lower bill does not give back what homeowners paid in 2025.

Sources

• Cuyahoga County, July 9, 2024 — proposed reappraisal results (32% average)
• Cuyahoga County Fiscal Officer, DTE 93 Abstract of Property, tax year 2024
• Cuyahoga County Treasurer, Rates of Taxation for Tax Year 2024 Due in 2025 and Tax Year 2023 Due in 2024
• DTE 515 Composite Reduction Factor Report, tax year 2025
• CDC PLACES, 2025 release, Garfield Heights and Cuyahoga County
• Signal Cleveland, December 13, 2024
• Supreme Court of Ohio caseload data; Garfield Heights Municipal Court 2023 Annual Report; Ohio Revised Code 1901.02(B)

From The Ward 2A Report, Issue 2026-003. The roughly 40 percent figure is my arithmetic from the county’s published rates. If a figure here is wrong, tell me and I will correct it.