The world’s municipalities face deeply troubling fiscal challenges, from infrastructure gaps—such as the estimated $3.6 trillion shortfall in the United States—or precarious financial instruments like China’s $3.3 trillion underfunded municipal debt. In addition to the difficulties of meeting existing infrastructure needs, rising urban populations and a changing climate require local governments to make additional, preemptive investments for the future of their communities in order to plan and prepare for growth and sustainability. As cities contend with historic needs, large-scale municipal bankruptcies, such as the crisis in Puerto Rico, have highlighted assorted and ongoing problems, including chronically meager or diminishing city revenues, increasing costs of providing public goods and services, mounting historical obligations, and expanding responsibilities to both higher-level governments and local citizens.

Recognizing these factors, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy launched the Municipal Fiscal Health Campaign in 2015 to help equip policymakers and local government officials with the tools to address their communities’ fiscal challenges. Our activities have included mobilizing transnational research, providing training, sharing policy ideas, and fostering regional and international dialogue. The campaign has engaged global audiences, including members of Congress, leaders within the Federal Reserve Bank, and state and local government officials.

A seminal event in the campaign’s trajectory, this conference convenes leading experts, scholars, and practitioners for an international dialogue to further elevate municipal fiscal health as an issue of global importance.  

Conference Goals:

• Convene academics, practitioners, government officials, and regulators to discuss the state of research and practice on municipal fiscal health;
• Elevate the global importance of municipal fiscal health and create a meaningful opportunity for the productive exchange of ideas among expert stakeholders;
• Raise awareness of the importance of land policy in promoting sound municipal fiscal health; and,
• Enable the sharing of experiences, solutions, best practices, and ideas in municipal fiscal health among scholars and practitioners from different countries.

View all conference materials, including speaker presentations, here.

Conference Sponsors 

*If you are attending the conference and require a hotel room, the Lincoln Institute and its event planner, Drew Company, have acquired a room block at the Westin Book Cadillac. You can indicate your need for a hotel room during the online registration process, and the event planners will book a room for you. The room rate is $199 per night plus applicable taxes and service fees. You will be responsible for the cost of your hotel accommodations upon check out. Hotel reservation cancellations made by Friday, April 27, 2018 will not be charged, cancellations received after this date may incur a one-night charge.

In the United States, about half of all homeowners pay their property taxes in just one or two large payments each year, rather than having the cost spread out into smaller (monthly) payments like most other bills and taxes. This payment schedule appears to cause several problems for homeowners and local governments; it can create financial challenges for households, increase tax delinquency, foster political opposition to the property tax, and requires governments to deal with irregular revenue inflows.

This webinar will describe how state and local governments can improve their property tax systems by allowing taxpayers to pay on a monthly basis. Adam H. Langley, Senior Research Analyst at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, will first cover key findings from his recent report, Improving the Property Tax by Expanding Options for Monthly Payments.

The next speakers will describe two of the best examples of monthly payment plans in the country. Claudia Fuentes, Treasurer for Marion County, Indiana, will describe Marion County’s Flex Pay plan. Jim Klajbor, Deputy Treasurer for Milwaukee, Wisconsin, will describe Milwaukee’s monthly property tax installment payment plan.

Some local governments would need to make large investments in their tax collections software before they could start accepting monthly payments. The final speaker, Vincent Reitano, Public Finance Associate at the Government Finance Officers Association, will provide information on these costs and how governments can minimize them based on findings from his recent report, Investing in Collections Software to Allow for Monthly Property Tax Payments.

Participant Outcomes

• Understand the problems that can result from billing property taxes on an annual or biannual basis, and the benefits of allowing monthly property tax payments.
• Learn about two of the best examples of monthly property tax payment plans: Marion County’s Flex Pay plan, and Milwaukee’s monthly installment plan.
• Gain insight into the wide-ranging costs that governments could face to update their tax collections software to allow monthly payments, and some strategies to minimize these costs.