Time to fix broken property-tax system
Letter to the Editor – Arizona Republic
February 13, 2008

Arizona Tax Revolt commentary:

I guess the person who wrote the following letter doesn’t consider a non-ad valorem tax to be an “exception” to the ad valorem tax cap, since unlike Prop 13 California and the Arizona Tax Revolt initiatives her measure has absolutely no limitation on those sorts of per-parcel taxes. Government will just shift to a parcel tax and we will pay even more than we do now! In my humble opinion, that so called Prop 13 measure will be totally useless at limiting property taxes. You might be interested to know, that group in their required financial disclosure filed with the Secretary of State on 1/30/08 showed absolutely no money spent on a legal review of their initiative language and it shows!

If a Lawyer had donated his/her time the disclosure is required to have shown an “in kind contribution.” In either case you get what you pay for!

Another concern with that so called Prop 13 measure… Suppose that you and your next door neighbor each bought $10,000 lots prior to 2003 and you immediately built your dream home costing $1,000,000. Your neighbor waited uuntil 2004 or later and built the identical $1,000,000 home on his lot. Now let’s assume Prop 13 Arizona or SCR1003 made it to the ballot and was approved by the voters. Your neighbor would have a taxable value of $10,000 ( his 2003 FCV) and you would have a $1,010,000 taxable value. (your 2003 FCV) You would be required to pay $5050 in tax or 10100% more than your next door neighbor’s $50 tax bill. Is this fair?

The Tax Revolt taxation system like Prop 13 California has a 2/3 vote requirement to approve non-ad valorem taxation and both you and your neighbor in the previous example would pay about the same tax since the value of the lots and improvements made are all valued to the 2003 valuation baseline. Though we do not claim to do away with Assessors, we do remove the current incentive for them to jack up valuations since doing so will no longer increase government revenue, as revenue is limited by the levy limitation and of course supermajority voter approval of additional funds, not valuations.

Marc Goldstone, Chair.
Arizona Tax Revolt

  Property valuations rose dramatically over the past few years, and our property-tax bills followed suit.

Few, if any, taxing districts adjusted their tax rates to spare us those big tax increases. They left tax rates where they were and reaped windfall tax revenues at our expense.

Now that valuations are plummeting, you're probably thinking the silver lining in that cloud is at least your property-tax bill will go down.

Surprise, surprise!

Your property-tax bill only goes up, it doesn't go down. The system is rigged.

The law is written so that when valuations decline, the tax rates automatically adjust upward to ensure tax revenues - and your tax bills - don't decline.

Our only hope is to take charge with an initiative, Proposition 13.

Proposition 13 rolls back valuations to 2003 full cash value or purchase price after Dec. 31, 2003, caps total tax at 0.5 percent for residential and 1 percent for all other real property, limits valuation increases to 2 percent per year and eliminates overrides and exceptions to the tax caps.

Nothing short of Proposition 13 will fix the property-tax mess. - Lynne Weaver, Phoenix The writer is chairwoman of Prop 13 Arizona.