By: Ed Passalugo
Assuming our lieutenant governor continues to crow about his distaste of higher and higher property taxes, when is the state going to start funding our schools at proper levels to alleviate property owners’ distress? When are he and his allies going to stop confounding citizens with fuzzy math that hides how state officials are shifting the tax burden to local citizens? Most importantly, when are local taxpayers going to quit being sheeple, realize what’s being done to them and cry foul on elected state leaders?
Mike Collier, a former PriceWaterhouseCoopers executive campaigning as a Democrat for lieutenant governor on this glaring disparity, offered sobering numbers during a visit to Waco last week, particularly for a fiscal-minded conservative Republican such as me: Between 2010 and 2017, state-plus-local spending per student (after inflation) in Waco Independent School District increased by only $31. At the same time, local taxes per student increased by $794. That’s because the state reduced its support per student by $763. Property taxes for schools are rising, true, but that’s because the Texas Legislature under Patrick, Abbott and others is shirking its duties to fund public education.
“People are really furious about property taxes,” says Collier, now campaigning with Republican Scott Milder, who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor against Patrick in the March GOP primary. “And Dan Patrick and Greg Abbott know they have this tremendous political liability going into the next election cycle and they know they better have something to say. But they will not address the root causes of the issue because it requires them to reverse decisions that they’ve made, decisions incentivized by campaign contributions. They will not address the root causes. So what they’ll do is cite cities and counties and school districts and say it’s runaway spending.”
To further complicate matters, some of our heftier property owners don’t pay their fair share of taxes. As Collier also notes, the so-called Equal and Uniform Law, passed in 1997, allows owners of large industrial and commercial properties to sue outgunned, taxpayer-funded appraisal districts and reduce their taxes well below market value. In 2006, the largest appraisal districts in the state estimated that owners of these properties were under-paying their taxes by some $4 billion per year ($5 billion in today’s dollars).
To quote Collier: “Texans therefore are getting hit twice on property taxes. We are paying more for schools because the state is withdrawing support and we are picking up the tab for property owners who aren’t paying their fair share of property taxes.”
Read more at WacoTrib.com