Property tax cap initiative withdrawn after AG review

BOISE – The sponsor of a one-page voter initiative seeking to cap property taxes and values for Idaho homes withdrew the measure on Monday, after a review by the Idaho Attorney General’s office found it both unconstitutional and plagued by technical problems.

“I got a 10-page critique from the attorney general of my one-page initiative,” said Fritz Dixon of Meridian, a retired physician and former state epidemiologist. “It just seems a little bit futile.”

Dixon drafted his measure after another group, Idaho Property Tax Reform Inc. of Orofino, submitted a tax-limiting measure that stretches for nearly 100 pages. That complicated proposal seeks to cap property taxes at 1 percent of value, cap values, eliminate the homeowner’s exemption, and make a series of other changes to Idaho tax codes.

Sponsors of that measure haven’t said how they’ll respond to the attorney general’s official review of their measure, which found it “cannot be implemented as written,” and said it violates the state constitution in four ways and has more than a dozen serious technical problems.

Charles Cline, chairman of Idaho Property Tax Reform, said Monday that his group was still working on its response and hoped to deliver it to the state this week. The attorney general’s review, by law, is only advisory, and initiative sponsors are free to proceed despite the warnings. But if an initiative passes that is unconstitutional or unworkable, it could be overturned in court. The Legislature also can change or repeal voter-passed initiatives.

Dixon said he figured that’s what would happen if his measure passed. “You take the whole 10 pages and look at each one, and realize that those could be cited and used as excuses for the Legislature killing the whole thing,” he said.

Dixon said he spoke to a special legislative interim committee looking into property tax reform ideas when it held a public hearing in Boise, as part of a series of a dozen hearings around the state. He encouraged others to contact the legislative panel if they have ideas about property tax reform.

“People who want to have input ought to go have input, and I’ve had mine,” Dixon said. “I think that’s all I’m going to do, except vote.”

The review, signed by Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden and citing analysis by Deputy Attorney General Ted Spangler, a tax law expert, pointed to these and other problems in Dixon’s measure:

“It would violate the “uniformity” clause of the Idaho Constitution by capping values for existing property at 2002 levels but valuing newly sold or constructed property at full value. “The Idaho Constitution, in Article 7, sections 2 and 5, requires that property taxes be uniform and in proportion to value,” Wasden wrote in the review. The same problem was noted in the longer initiative.

“Like the longer measure, the one-page initiative was “inoperable,” the review found, because it didn’t specify how Idaho’s multiple, overlapping taxing districts, each of which answers to its own electorate, would come up with a total tax rate for each property of 1 percent or less.

“In addition to the uniformity problem, the review found that four other aspects of the one-page initiative conflicted with the Idaho Constitution, including an attempt to allow local-option taxes only if two-thirds of the qualified electors in a district voted in favor. That requirement violates the constitutional requirement that “all elections by the people must be by ballot,” the review found, by counting every voter who decides not to cast a ballot as a “no” vote.