AATA Would Lose $420K Without PPT

If Michigan’s personal property tax were to be eliminated, as proposed in Senate Bill 34, the amount of the annual transit tax that’s used to help fund the the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority would decrease by $420,000 annually. That’s a point of information included in the AATA’s annual audit, which was recently done by Plante & Moran.

AATA controller Phil Webb included the item in his reaction to other findings in the audit – which he conveyed in a memo to AATA’s CEO Michael Ford. The memo was part of the AATA board’s information packet for its April 19, 2012 meeting. Other audit findings were discussed at the board’s March 15, 2012 meeting and included in The Chronicle’s report of that meeting.

Currently, the AATA receives around $9 million a year from a roughly 2 mill tax. The $9 million is about 31% of the AATA’s $29.4 million FY 2012 budgeted revenues. The elimination of the personal property tax would decrease the AATA’s total budget revenues by around 1.4%.