Another day, another dollar.

Which, if you’re like me, you’ll probably be saving to turn over to the county tax commissioner later this year.

That’s not the tax commissioner’s fault, mind you. That particular official collects taxes, not set the rates. You can’t blame the tax assessor’s office, either. Those folks go by what the law tells them to do, which is determine a fair market value. So, if enough lunatics are willing to pay $400,000 for cookie cutter houses that two-three years ago might’ve gone for a little over half that, if that, your property values will likely go up. And if your property values go up, chances are your taxes are going to do one of two things, depending on what various governments do with their millage rates.

If they’re like Bryan County, they’d take a rollback rate – which Bryan County did again this year. That means the county portion of your taxes should remain unchanged.

And if they’re like other governing bodies hereabouts apart from Pembroke, they’ll probably leave the millage rate unchanged, which means the taxes paid to them will go up because your house has been appraised for more. Pembroke changed it charter recently to allow it to increase it’s millage rate because services cost money there, too.

And since the bottom line on your tax bill is added up from various millage rates, your taxes are probably going up. In some cases a lot.

Looking for something or someone to blame? You don’t have to look far. It’s all around you, the result of being the fastest growing county in the fastest growing region in the local solar system.

I.e., welcome to all this wonderful growth. It’s a direct contributor to the increase in property values – more demand allows higher prices – and has added to the burden on local governments, which have to provide everything from ambulances to classrooms to teachers to fill them and administrators making six figures to administrate the teachers and try to keep parent happy.

It means the need for more cops and firefighters and school buses and laptops and pothole fillers and dog catchers and everything else. And those don’t come free. Property owners pay for a sizable chunk of it, and taxpayers – including property owners – in one form or another pay for a lot of what’s not covered through impact or user fees. Which isn’t all that much.

None of it comes from the largesse of government, mind you. They take your tax money money, and theirs, too, in fairness, and decide how it will be spent and try to do a good enough job of it to keep you from getting out the pitchforks and sending them packing.

One hopes they spend it wisely, but you never know.

We live in unwise times, I think, and that’s hardly limited to government officials. To misquote Soren Kierkegaard, we’ve gone nuts exercising our freedom of speech without taking much advantage of our freedom and responsibility to think. And to misquote Henry Thoreau, if everybody worried about reforming themselves first, then maybe society would be reformed. But we approach it bass ackwards. And that’s neither here nor there.

Will relief from taxes come? There’s a school of thought, expressed in this newspaper recently by the county commission chairman, that by diversifying the tax base the burden on home owners will be lessened down the road.

That means eventually Hyundai will pay so much in taxes from it’s $8.5 billion addition to the tax base various governments will be able to lower their millage rates, thereby lowering property taxes. Or so the notion goes.

Perhaps there’s proof of that actually happening somewhere, I don’t know. The other side of the coin is what’s down the road along with all that extra tax money coming in. The need for more schools for the kids moving in. More roundabouts to confuse their parents. More buses to carry the kids who don’t get a ride from their parents. More administrators to administrate. More cops making just above a living income to arrest folks who can’t behave. More jail cells to put them in and more jailers to keep them from killing each other.

More first responders to scrape people off the roads because somebody didn’t know how to use a blinker or thinks the speed limit is the starting point. More parks. More boat ramps. More gyms. More paved roads to maintain and more potholes to fill because of all the semis rolling up and down the road.

More trash to pick up, and, while maybe nobody’s talking about this at the moment, more places to put all the garbage generated by all this wonderful growth.

There is a bright side to all this, maybe. You’ll probably get more restaurants and shopping centers and so on, because that’s what folks consider important these days, or so it seems. Opportunities to consume.

And one way or the other, it’s costing us.