Many Ray County property owners were faced with paying a higher tax bill than anticipated at the close of 2022. Ray County Tax Assessor Linda Coleman has given some input regarding the tax increase. There are multiple reasons for the real estate and personal property taxes hike, mainly due to vehicle computer chip shortages, increased cost of used vehicles, home data corrections and inflation. “There is a chip shortage. People are buying used cars for more money,” Coleman said. “Once people could no longer get newer vehicles because of the chip shortage causing a new vehicle shortage. Then there started to be more of a demand for used cars. Once there was high demand for used cars, then they started pushing the value of the used cars up, which caused our personal property tax to go up,” the assessor explained. The tax commission told Coleman some of the vehicle values could go up by 36 percent. Therefore, the price of used vehicles escalated and property taxes went up in return,…