Property tax hikes incoming? Rep. Jim Walsh sounds the alarm

Hi, it's State Representative Jim Walsh. I'm here on the floor of the House of Representatives in Olympia to talk about three really bad tax increase bills. And all three of the bills I'm going to talk about here have to do with property taxes and raising property tax. Two of the bills come out of the State House. Those are House Bill 2049 and House Bill 1334. And one of the bad bills comes out of the Senate. That's Senate Bill 5798. Now what these three bills have in common is they all, in different kind of technical, mechanical ways, allow for property taxes in our state to go up even higher, at a higher rate than they go up right now. And that's bad because property taxes have been going way up already. This basically throws gasoline on that fire. Now what we have in this state is a property tax system that is basically backwards. In most states, the way they do property tax calculations is they figure, by different methods, an approximate market value of your property. And then they tax that approximate market value on a formula. And then that comes up with tax money, tax revenue going to the state. And then the state tells its agencies and then local governments, school districts and counties, how much money the state expects and how much they can build their budgets around. Okay. In Washington, we do it a different way. The state government, in coordination with local county governments and school districts and others, figure out what their budgets are, how much money they want. And then the state tells the county assessors how much they've got to collect. And then the county assessors figure out what your pro rata share of that number is. So in our state, in Washington, our property taxes are what's called budget-based. The budgets come first, and then the taxpayer is told how much they owe on their property. That's backwards. That's the tail wagging the dog. None of these three bills, House Bill 2049, House Bill 1334, or House Bill 5798, fix that broken system. What they do is they increase the rate at which that broken system, that tail wagging the dog, can increase property taxes. It's not just bad policy. It's the opposite direction we want to go. It would be much better for the people of the state, and even for the state, to reform our property taxes so that they're based more on a market value than on what government needs and wants. These are bad bills. They don't address the real problem that's taxing people out of their homes, literally, in our state. We need to fix our property tax system in Washington, and none of these three bills does that. We're voting no on these bills, and I hope you will stay involved and help us reform our tax system in Washington, not keep running property taxes up.