We touched on this yesterday when talking about a sales tax vote in Midland, Texas, last Saturday that got rejected by voters.
This time it's the movement to require voter approval of property tax hikes without them having to navigate through the obstacles set up by the legislature.
EmpowerTexans.com tells us about it in Legislative Priority: Give Voters A Say On Excessive Tax Hikes. Currently, only the school districts are required to seek voter approval of a tax hike over the rollback limit. For the other taxing entities, EmpowerTexans.com says this:
Under current law, taxpayers only have one option—a burdensome petition drive.
In both rural and urban areas, this onerous process requires that taxpayers collect an overwhelming number of voter signatures over a very short period of time – and hire lawyers to protect their validity – before a public vote on the proposed tax increase is triggered.
Politicians routinely instruct their staff to fight and discredit these efforts. They also spend taxpayer money on lawyers to resist holding public votes, forcing citizens to file expensive lawsuits.
Upon closer review, it becomes obvious that state laws pertaining to the citizen-petition process were designed to thwart voters in favor of money-hungry governments. These petition requirements should be replaced with automatic elections.
Texas Governor Gregg Abbott is very much in favor of property tax reform. Here's part of his State of the State where he talks about it in this Youtube video. In it he refers to Senator Bettencourt who can be found here.
Other advocates of giving more power to voters include Sarah Davis of Houston who has introduced several bills on the topic. One is HB 1144 which, if passed, would extend the restrictions on the school districts to all taxing units for proposed increases over the rollback tax rate.
"Rollback tax rate" -- weasel words, as that rate is set by the legislature which has its own budget challenges, and one might fear that they would be sympathetic to other entities dependent on tax revenue. But Ms. Davis proposed two other statutes which would peg the rollback rate to the consumer price index during the year preceding the proposed tax hike. That would be HB 1146 and HB 1147.
Other legislators have proposed similar statutes. Go to the list and do a page search for "valorem" to see them all.
All that having been said, hundreds of bills get proposed in each Texas legislative session, and only a fraction of them get passed. So we'll have to wait and see what they do with these important issues. Having Abbott on board certainly can't hurt.
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