Another look at reappraisals

When Rep. Mike Jopek's Property Tax Reappraisal Mitigation Bill, House Bill 658, arrived in the Senate Tax Committee, it was a mess. It was $17.8 million off of revenue neutral in the first four years and added 21.8 employees to the Department of Revenue. Both these traits were deal-breakers in the Montana Senate.

The Department of Revenue reappraised property values; the Legislature had the power to adjust tax rates, exclusions and phase the changes in over six years.

In the Senate Tax Committee, Republicans worked in a bipartisan way with moderate Democrats to craft a bill that minimized tax shifts, kept tax rates as low and flat as possible, and still met constitutional mandates. We maintained current programs to aid the poor, elderly, renters and veterans with their property taxes. As the folks know, any tax relief for one taxpayer results in a tax increase for another taxpayer.

Our goal was to help the truly needy, but not to redistribute wealth. If we had not passed a mitigation bill, it would have resulted in a huge property tax increase for the citizens of Montana.

Rep. Jopek threatened the Senate Tax Committee and did everything in his power to muddy the mitigation process to the point that Senate Democrats went to the House Leadership and requested that he be removed from the joint House-Senate Conference Committee.

HB 658, as amended in the Senate, while not perfect, does a very good job of making sure that in counties across the state, taxes on the median houses remained neutral. The mitigation strategy did not work well for homes in recreational areas, which had huge increases in valuations.

Northwest Montana legislators, such as myself, are working to find why the data given the Legislature by the Department of Revenue understated the number of taxpayers with huge property-tax increases. I am following the AB26 process, and hope that it works in a fair and orderly way for as many taxpayers as possible, and believe that the Sales Assessment Ratio and look-back provisions in HB 658 will help the 2011 legislature to fine-tune the reappraisal process, to make it more predictable and fair.

Bruce Tutvedt, of Kalispell, is the Republican state senator for Senate District 3, which includes rural Whitefish.