For homeowners on a fixed income no inflation is worse than rising property taxes. Mine jumped $500 this year, a 20.8% increase with specials figured in.
Sixteen years ago, I won a state Senate seat campaigning for spending some of the state’s budget surplus on property tax relief. Some holdover legislators said it wasn’t a state issue. If they would do anything about property taxes it would be to slap restrictions on elected city, county and school officials and cap their budgets.
When the cities and counties rose up in protest there was an impasse. I introduced a solution. Help people pay their property tax bills. State coffers were overflowing, as they are today. Send some of it to taxpayers through a refundable credit of 10% of their property taxes.
My bill failed on a party-line vote two weeks into the session. Three months later, with property tax relief still stymied the legislative council attorney who had drafted my bill brought it to the conference committee and they adopted it with a couple amendments. They capped relief at $1000 per property and removed a provision for renters’ relief. The amended bill passed both houses and the session ended. Property tax relief eventually reached 12% of tax owed but that went away 5 years ago.
It needs to be restored. It could easily be improved to 20%. Let the elected local officials develop the budgets their jurisdictions need, but help homeowners pay the tax. The current budget forecasts a $1.3 billion increase in the Legacy Fund to $9.4 billion and that was before oil prices jumped to $80 a barrel. The state is sitting on huge surpluses while its residents are forced to dig deeper to pay the taxes on our homes. That is fixable.