Property taxes

The business-page headlines bray that home resale prices in Southern Nevada are plummeting. And defaults by “sub-prime” mortgage holders could depress things even more.

Local tax assessors don’t wait till a property changes hands to revise its valuation, of course. Homeowners regularly saw their bills soar during the go-go ’90s — even on houses that hadn’t changed hands since the Reagan years. If a house down the street sold for $50,000 more than last year, your bill went up, as well.

So property tax bills — and monthly mortgage payments that are adjusted to include those bills — should now be dropping all over the valley. Right? Sorry.

That means there’s still a considerable hunger among voters for a more permanent limit on property tax increases — something closer to California’s Proposition 13 — says Sharron Angle, the former Republican state legislator and unsuccessful 2006 congressional candidate.

Ms. Angle heads up We the People of Nevada, an outfit which aims to qualify a ballot measure to roll back assessed property valuations to an undisclosed year, place a 1 percent tax rate on those values, and then cap annual tax bill increases to 2 percent.

Ms. Angle’s outfit announced this week it has just banked an anonymous $200,000 contribution to kick off its fund-raising efforts. Two previous attempts to qualify similar amendments — efforts dependent on volunteer petition passers — failed to gather enough names.

An added obstacle was added when the last Legislature passed a requirement that signatures be collected in all 17 counties.

Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas is opposed.

The 2005 Legislature “came up with a bipartisan solution which gave longtime homeowners relief,” Ms. Buckley protested this week, referring to the two-tiered legislative edict which now allows property taxes to rise by 3 percent yearly for primary residences, and by 8 percent annually for commercial, rental and other property. “Why do we need to come up with another measure that some out-of-state financier wants to import to Nevada?” she asks.

(Ms. Angle isn’t saying where the $200,000 check came from, but blaming “out-of-state ideas” always sounds good. We await Ms. Buckley’s renunciation of such out-of-state ideas as seat belt, motorcycle helmet and draconian DUI laws.)

“We have to maintain a balance,” intones Ms. Buckley. “We want to keep taxes low and stable, but we want to make sure we’re not going to hurt our schools.” But Ms. Angle quite sensibly points out our mercuric Legislature could alter its current property tax formula at any time — a volatility that would be curbed under a constitutional amendment.

The real problems with the current property tax system are more deeply ingrained than either of these parties seems ready to confront, of course.

In the first place, why should those who buy real property with after-tax dollars then have to pay additional “rent” to their local governments indefinitely? It’s interesting to note how the political class recoiled with horror at that portion of last year’s eminent domain initiative that would have declared property rights “fundamental rights.” Can we be taxed for exercising a “fundamental right”?

But second, even if property taxes are deemed an appropriate way to fund local governments, why not set the annual or biennial budget, add up a “grand list” of assessed property, and then regularly re-set the tax rate to produce only the revenues needed — with the rate to be OK’d by public vote of the elected county commission?

Under such a system, rapid economic growth could actually cause tax rates to drop, rather than generating unforeseen “spend-me-quick” windfalls for our entrenched porkmeisters.

In the meantime, however, if Ms. Buckley is correct and voters are happy with her current assurances and guarantees of “low and stable” tax bills, she need not worry — Ms. Angle won’t be able to gather enough signatures to put together a softball team, and this “problem” of uppity peasants attempting to set their own tax rates will promptly disappear.