EDITORIAL: Lawmakers fall short, again, on property-tax relief

To no one’s surprise, pending property tax-relief legislation that will be officially unveiled this week at the Capitol won’t cure what ails Colorado’s homeowners. It won’t even ease their pain much. At best, it’s mere balm for deep wounds inflicted by skyrocketing property taxes.

As noted in news reports last week previewing the awaited property-tax plan, it largely reiterates a proposal released last month by a special property-tax commission impaneled by the legislature. And like the commission’s proposal, it falls short in fundamental ways.

The proposal, pitched and supported by ruling Democrats at the Capitol, does include a nominal cap on property-tax increases. It purportedly holds increases in total property-tax revenue to the rate of inflation. But that cap is really more of a sieve.

It would exempt property taxes collected for schools and home-rule cities. Of course, most of the average homeowner’s property tax bill is for schools. Exempting them, not to mention home-rule cities, could nearly negate the proposal’s provisions for taming the 19%-25% surges in residential property-tax bills homeowners are seeing this year.

And other local governments would be able to evade the cap as well. They could raise their mill levies to generate more revenue than the cap allows so long as their governing bodies — not the voting public — approve the mill-levy hikes at public meetings. Which all of them would do.

In other words, it’s not much of a cap at all.

The proposal has some modest sweeteners like phased-in reductions in the property assessment rate for commercial property. It also would let owners of single-family homes reduce their taxable assessment value by 10%, up to $75,000 — meaning the break tops out for homes valued at $750,000. Any home valued over that threshold — as so many middle-class, Front Range homes are nowadays — won’t derive any additional benefit.

Incredibly, this latest iteration of legislative property-tax relief includes another fatal flaw legislative Democrats have tried to slip through on previous tries at tax relief. It would make homeowners pay for it themselves — by tapping some of the surplus revenue they are supposed to get back from the state each year in the form of TABOR refunds.

The premise of that galling feature is to “backfill” local governments that might get shortchanged by the proposal’s theoretical revenue cap. Which raises an as-yet-unanswered question: Why would any local governments come up short under this proposal — when the minimal caps only would limit the rate of increase in property tax revenue to their coffers?

The proposal’s shadow author, the Commission on Property Tax, was created by lawmakers during last November’s special legislative session on tax relief. The resulting relief was meager — even after a public rebuke with the defeat of the legislature’s Proposition HH. That was lawmakers’ bait-and-shaft tax hike disguised as property-tax relief, which voters rejected by an 18-point margin only weeks earlier on the Nov. 7 statewide ballot.

The special session’s minor tweaks covered only the tax bills that went out this spring. The commission was supposed to develop a long-term solution — and this is all it could muster.

Which makes it all the more likely Colorado voters will embrace the far more substantive property-tax relief that’s on the statewide ballot this coming November. It would reset property values to 2020 levels, limit annual increases in property taxes to 4% and lower the statutory residential and commercial assessment rates used to help calculate total tax bills.

Lawmakers fear and loathe that proposal — but they had their chance. Three chances, in fact. Which makes their latest a strikeout.