don’t your taxes go up if you valuation goes up?

Not really where I live, anyway. Here, the total tax burden is determined and then the relative burdens are apportioned to individual homes based on their relative values. My home’s value went up because everything in this township went up by about that percentage. It is an incentive against improving your property, though, since if your house’s valuation increases relative to other homes, you will get hit with a bigger share of the total tax burden.

My township has an additional issue: the local school district is allowed to collect whatever total amount of money they want each year, not subject to approval by the council (and the school tax by far makes up most of the total tax burden). The only thing preventing them from raising the school tax to absurd amounts is that the school board is re-elected every year and too much school tax would get them voted out (most of them get voted out every year anyway, largely because of the school tax as it already stands). I’m not bothered by it because our schools are among the best in the state, and are the primary reason houses here are in such great demand. As a school bus driver, it’s also what pays my own salary.