In the Daily Montanan, Dennis Taylor recently opined about our property tax bills and the huge increases that we all saw in them this fall. He summed it up by finding fault with one sole source.
Well, actually two.
He closed, “It was not caused by our local governments, it was Gov. Gianforte and his Republican supermajority Legislature who stuck it to us.”
While there may be some truth to that summary, Taylor ignores the impact that local governments, and their budgets, have on the amounts we pay. They set the mills levied (which are limited statutorily to an inflationary factor), they determine assessment rates for special districts (which have no statutory limitations) and their citizenry (usually yearly) vote themselves increases through the passage of various bonds and levies.
Bottom line, the tax bill on our home here in Helena, including assessments, has more than doubled during the past decade. Reducing the cause to one sole source ignores the reality of the complex difficulty in setting those rates and makes it very difficult to find helpful solutions to the significant burden faced by Montana homeowners.
I have no reason to doubt that what he said of the ability of the Montana Legislature and Gianforte to adjust the homeowner property tax rate could have helped lessen the blow that we face at the end of this month. But it does not stand alone as the sole contributor. At a recent meeting of Hometown Helena, a local civic group, state and county officials and a journalist from the Montana Free Press presented, or tried to, on just what goes into our tax bills. The takeaway is that it is difficult to track the dizzying variety of inputs.
But, for Taylor to say that local governments and their budgets are blameless glosses over even a cursory review of property tax bills from the last decade. If you still have yours, I would encourage you to examine them. As I look at ours, I find that the local governments represented there, the Helena School District, Lewis & Clark County and the City of Helena, contribute to roughly 95% of the bill. The amount of property taxes levied more than doubled in each case. Part of that can be attributed to the tax rates set by local governments and part by voter approved bonds and levies in addition to the factors pointed out in Mr. Taylor’s op-ed. The assessments charged for special districts, increased 40% and 117% for the City of Helena and Lewis & Clark County, respectively. And rising to the top, it seems, our home’s value increased almost 350%. At the end of the decade, the total amount we owed for property taxes payable to the Lewis & Clark County Treasurer increased by 103%, compared to a roughly 30% inflation rate over that same period.
In order to find comprehensive and sustainable solutions to the ever-increasing financial impacts of property taxes for homeowners, we (citizens and our elected representatives) can’t afford to simply reduce the problem to a single thing. We must look at the entirety of the problem to find long-lasting solutions for Montana homeowners.
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