ByGene Meyer
March 9, 2010

(KansasReporter) TOPEKA, Kan. – Kansas House Taxation committee members voted to send a proposed lid on new property tax increases to the House floor Tuesday after first changing a key condition in the plan.

The plan originally proposed in House Bill 2630 by state Rep. Steve Brunk, a Bel Aire Republican, would require city, county or other local governments empowered to collect property taxes to hold those collections constant by adjusting mill rates downward to compensate for rising assessed property values. The plan also would require those governments to win voter approval in all but a handful of circumstance for raising property taxes if the lid proved too low.

That second condition was modified by an amendment proposed by state Rep. Jeff King, an Independence Republican and Taxation committee vice chairman, who expressed concern that frequent mandatory elections might harm local governments’ budget drafting efforts.

King’s proposal, which was adopted on a 13-7 show of hands, would scrap the required elections and allow local governments to increase property tax collections by enough to keep up with Consumer Price Index-measured inflation. The governments also would be allowed to seek higher property taxes than that, but would be required to seek voter approval if five percent of their voters signed protest petitions requesting that election.

King said this approach would provide needed flexibility for local governments in harder-pressed cities and counties where tax bases aren’t being buffed up by new construction or other economic development that Brunk’s proposal exempted from the lid.

Such protest petitions worked well in the 1990s before legislative sunset provisions wiped them from Kansas law, King said. “And I believe they still reflect the spirit of 2630,” King said.

State Rep. Virgil Peck, a Republican from Tyro and one of several cosponsors of Brunk’s original bill, disagreed.

Allowing taxing bodies to ignore property tax lids if they choose and reining them in only if sufficient numbers of voters agree to put the question to a referendum does not afford the same protection that requiring elections as originally called for would, Peck said.

“It puts the monkey back on the back of local voters and not on local governments,” Peck said.

Brunk said after the vote that he also was disappointed by the change.

“Protest petitions were too complicated and cumbersome in the ‘90s, which is one of the reasons they were allowed to die,” Brunk said. “And that’s why property taxes since then have been rising three times faster than inflation.