New Initiative

The Mohave Valley Daily News
By NEIL YOUNG
Thursday, May 10, 2007

BULLHEAD CITY - Bullhead City-based Arizona Tax Revolt is gearing up for another petition drive, this time to get on the Nov. 2008 ballot with its measure to lower property taxes.

If passed, the initiative would create a constitutional amendment that would also establish budgetary limits for all taxing entities or jurisdictions, such as fire departments, school districts and flood control districts.

“All we're doing is expanding the protections of Prop 101 that the voters approved last November to include all the taxing entities - not just a select few,” said Marc Goldstone, Arizona Tax Revolt (ATR) chairman. Proposition 101 covers only the taxing jurisdictions of county, city, town and community college districts.

Before even being voted on, the initiative gives jurisdictions an incentive to keep tax increases to a minimum. If the taxing entities live within a 2 percent maximum tax increase in 2007 and 2008, their designated rollback will be the average of the past four budgets. Otherwise, they will roll back to 2005. “The idea is you can't reduce taxes unless ultimately government reduces spending,” Goldstone said.

All properties, including commercial properties, would receive a valuation rollback. “The actual value of your home will be rolled back to what the value was in an earlier year,” Goldstone said, “and there's a formula within the measure that determines which year for each individual property, so some properties can roll back six years (and) others might only roll back one year. It's ... based on the type of increases in value that particular property has seen,” he said.

“It will undo the very large increases that the property owners have seen in recent years,” Goldstone said. “Those that have seen the largest increases, they'll reap the largest benefit by having the value reduced.”

Property valuations would not be allowed to rise more than 2 percent a year and starting in 2010, taxing jurisdictions would only be able to increase their levies by 2 percent, plus growth, annually.

Goldstone said he's learned from mistakes made during his unsuccessful drive to get an initiative on the ballot last November. He fell 45,000 signatures short of the required 184,000. The shortfall was mostly due to having to scrap previously signed petitions in the middle of the drive to rewrite the language of the measure to conform with the state's single subject rule. The fear was his initiative could be thrown out if challenged in court.

He now has more leeway in how he words his ballot measure. The Arizona State Supreme Court recently ruled they're not going to base the single subject rule “on whether every voter could be expected to support each little piece of the proposition,” Goldstone said. “Now, instead they're going to say, as long as all the pieces of the proposition have a common purpose, then it's okay for them to be voted on at once.”

This time, ATR has 14 months to gather signatures. Goldstone has purchased approximately 6,000 names of property owners who lost appeals to lower their tax assessments in Maricopa, Pima and Pinal counties. He'll contact all of them, asking each to gather 15 names on a petition.

ATR will need 230,000 valid signatures to get on next year's ballot. Those signatures will be turned in at the end of June, 2008, Goldstone said.

Currently, the language of the proposition is being fine-tuned by a Phoenix attorney with Perkins Coie Brown & Bain. “We can't rush them because this thing has to be perfect,” Goldstone said. “People are going to invest a lot of their time in qualifying this for the ballot and a lot of their dollars to help with the expenses so we owe it to them for this thing to be 100 percent bulletproof and something that will withstand all court challenges.”