Rhetoric Meets Reality in Indiana Property Tax Reform  

Years ago economist David Friedman came up with an idea for property tax assessment that is probably too simple -- and too beautiful -- to ever be put into practice.  It's called self-assessment.  Every property owner would be allowed to come up with his or her own dollar value on the worth of their property.  But there's a catch.  If someone offers them that sum of money, they have to sell it.

Don't want to move?  Then you'd better put a high dollar amount down on your tax form.  In the blink of an eye you put a thousand tax assessors out of work, save a forest of trees cut down to print assessment manuals, and create a system that cannot possibly be called unfair by taxpayers, because they're the ones who control it.

Okay, now it's time to wake up.  Property tax reform in Indiana is nothing quite as radical as that.  And no one would ever call it beautiful.  But it's a reality that, even in its still-born, incomplete stage, millions of taxpayers are beginning to understand.

If the rumblings of newspaper letters are any guide, many are not happy with the result.  That was the fear of many  legislators, who voted to

 lessen the pain by shifting half of the school levy from the property tax in the historic House Bill 1001, passed in 2002.  That cut, along with increases in other exemptions and credits, allowed them to claim that the impact of court-mandated reassessment on average property tax burdens would be very small.

Those of us who read Purdue University economist Larry DeBoer's 1996 study on market value-based assessment had to bite our tongues at that point.   If that study proved anything, it was how many questions had to be answered before we can know how changing assessment methods will impact any given homeowner's final bill.   As taxpayers across the state are in the process of discovering, the impact of restructuring and re-assessment on property tax bills on average, and on their own individual bills, are two separate things entirely.

So it is that owners of older homes, rental property, and residents of areas of the state where old assessment procedures were wildly at odds with market value, can expect to be hit up for more money when their now overdue tax bills finally arrive.

Could that outcome have been

 avoided?  No, in all likelihood.  Could it have been communicated more effectively to taxpayers?  Perhaps.  But voters have a habit of killing messengers who give them bad news, and few leaders wanted to take that risk.

But the complexity of the issue made it hard for even the best-informed voters to follow.  That same complexity, and the loss of control taxpayers feel over their final tax bills, has helped the property tax retain its dubious distinction as the most loathed tax in the state.

At the top of the list is the levy method of setting rates.  Guaranteeing a steady, predictable revenue stream from the property tax makes schools and local governments happy, but turns individual taxpayer bills into a crap shoot.  It makes other taxpayers, not government, pay for actions that reduce the tax base.  And in today's low inflation environment, it allows for an expansion in the size of local government with little or no voter input.

Most legislators would rather kiss a pig than vote again on anything as significant as HB 1001 right away.  Will voters and taxpayers allow that to happen?

Patrick M. Barkey