Tax Activist Refuses To Accept Rejection He’s Dividing Failed Initiative, Putting School Financing First

Anti-tax activist Ron Rankin was not kidding on election night when he said he would not take the voters’ rejection of his latest property tax-cutting initiative as their final word on tax relief.

The newly elected Kootenai County Commission member is splitting in two the proposition voters defeated by nearly 2-to-1 last month. He promised to submit the costliest of the two new measures for review the day after state lawmakers convene in January.

“We’ll make the only slow news day not so slow,” Rankin said.

That proposition would shift an estimated $227 million in school district maintenance and operating costs from local property taxes to the state treasury.

The other would cap remaining property taxes at 1 percent of taxable value, costing local governments about $75 million.

Rankin said both will be circulated for signatures to qualify them for the 1998 ballot if lawmakers fail to enact the kind of dramatic property tax reductions he has been demanding for more than a decade.

Rankin said he intends to accomplish with the school financing proposal what lawmakers tried to accomplish in 1994 in a bill that was vetoed as excessive by then Gov. Cecil Andrus.

Although he supported the legislative proposal during the 1994 campaign, Gov. Phil Batt actively opposed Rankin’s initiative this year. The governor dismissed Rankin’s claim that the state could cover its increased liability for public schools with increased state revenues from natural growth and budget cuts.

Instead, Batt warned that the proposition would only cause state sales or income taxes to rise, and he told Idaho business leaders that since they pay 70 percent of the property taxes and would get 70 percent of the break under the initiative they could expect to be the target of the new taxes to cover the revenue shift.

Batt did, however, endorse additional property tax relief after Rankin’s initiative failed on Nov. 5, although the options he suggested as possible approaches would not seem to meet Rankin’s expectations.

The other half of his package, Rankin said, would be modified from the proposition voters rejected to exclude school districts, which would be covered by the other initiative anyway, and all local emergency services.

“We’re going to make it simple enough to make the State Board of Education understand it even with their new math,” Rankin said.