The Franklin County Auditor's site is a great place to learn about the home and parcel you'd like to buy.

Is it because you’re being doubly taxed? Not at all.  One likely explanation is that your would-be home is being taxed one time but some of that tax is going to pay for a TIF.

TIF stands for Tax Increment Financing.  If you add the taxes associated with each parcel number, you find the total tax for that home.  The portion of the tax associated with the parcel number -090 goes to pay for area infrastructure improvements.

You’d be surprised to find that Columbus has at least 50 TIF areas. Some of the most recent include the Morse Road Area and Downtown (where the TIF is said to be slated for new city-owned parking garages planned on S. Front Street (in the River South development area) and at N. 4th and Elm streets (Neighborhood Launch development area). Not Surprising, you’ll find TIFs in place around shopping sites such as Polaris, Tuttle Mall and the Easton Development as well as the Brewery District and the Arena District.

A TIF is NOT a special tax (like a Special Improvement District downtown) or an increase in taxes or an assessment (like for streetlights in Clintonville). Rather, it is just the way that the taxing authority is able to clarify which portion of that homeowner’s real estate taxes will go toward paying for the TIF.  If you take the taxes from both parcel numbers and add them together, you will come up with the normal, everyday taxes owed by that parcel. In the next couple of years, Franklin County hopes to have smarter software that will identify those properties and how much of the total tax goes to the TIF, but for now, they need to use two different parcel numbers.

In a nutshell, here is how a TIF works:  A TIF is a tool to use future gains in taxes to finance the current improvements that will create those gains. Take Italian Village for instance. When a public project such as a road, school, or Jeffrey Place Project is carried out, there is often an increase in the value of surrounding real estate (Italian Village in General) and perhaps new investment (new or rehabilitated buildings, for example). This increased site value and investment generates increased tax revenues. The increased tax revenues are the “tax increment.”

Tax Increment Financing dedicates tax increments within a certain defined district to finance debt issued to pay for the project. TIF is designed to channel funding toward improvements in distressed or underdeveloped areas where development would not otherwise occur. TIF creates funding for public projects that may otherwise be unaffordable to localities.