Reappraisal mitigation

I would like to thank everyone who attended the Property Tax Mitigation Forum at Flathead Valley Community College and the Revenue and Transportation Committee Hearing in Helena on property tax reappraisal. These forums were truly constructive; the attending legislators all came away with valuable information.

At these meetings, the public was also informed on how constrained the Montana Legislature is by the Montana Constitution. The Constitution requires that we appraise all property to its market value and equalize tax rates by property class across the state in a timely manner.

While some disagree with the manner in which Montana collects property taxes, the legislature does not have the authority to independently change the constitution. For any legislator to support a bill, such as an acquisition-based value system, without changes to the Montana Constitution, violates the Constitution and our oath of office.

The Montana Legislature passed the property tax reappraisal mitigation bill in a bipartisan fashion with the following goals — the bill should:

¥ Be revenue neutral by class.

¥ Keep effective tax rates as low as possible.

¥ Continue our programs to assist the elderly, the poor, the renter and veterans with paying their property tax bills. Montana has fair circuit breakers aiding these low income groups.

The liberal caucus' goals 'represented by Mike Jopek) were to make the property tax system progressive. They sought to raise property taxes across the board by between 10 and 30 percent and redistribute that revenue. Many of their mitigation proposals were unconstitutional, and those that were constitutional wouldn't have helped the property owners who have seen the largest tax increases.

The 2009 legislature's bipartisan property tax mitigation bill did a good job of mitigating property taxes for median homes across Montana, but it was not effective in mitigating the outliers that had an increase in value of greater than 100 percent.

By Department of Revenue director Dan Buck's own admission, the legislature was not provided with accurate information pertaining to the number of residential taxpayers (outliers' who saw a drastic increase in their property taxes.

The numbers presented to the legislature only included owner-occupied homes — they did not include second homes, rental properties or vacant land. This lack of information made it difficult to foresee the magnitude of the impact on Flathead County taxpayers.

The Revenue and Transportation Committee will meet in Helena on Feb. 18 and 19 to discuss the potential changes to property tax reappraisal. On Feb. 18, we will have two breakout groups. One will cover commercial and residential property evaluations, and the other will cover agriculture and forestry land.

The 2011 legislature will reexamine the property tax reappraisal system to find ways to mitigate property taxes across Montana. Please help me in this effort.

Sen. Bruce Tutvedt, R-Kalispell, can be reached at 257-9732.