Voters will see two fewer questions on November’s ballot as a result of the Legislature’s special session this week. The two were extreme reactions to the higher property taxes property owners are dealing with, and would have limited school funding and required considerable revenue backfill from the state. One, had it passed, would have been added to the constitution.
The governor and legislative leadership of both parties agreed to a valuation reduction of about 2% for residential owners and about 7% for commercial property owners, the latter being unusually high.
They are worth about $50 on a $500,000 home and about $800 on a $3 million commercial property, with a total reduction in state revenue of about $250 million annually.
A cap on school taxation was set at 6% unless inflation is higher and 5.25% for other categories, both of which can be exceeded by voters.
But don’t look for the reductions, and caps, to appear in the 2024 tax bills received early in 2025; they will be effective one year later.
The renewed attention to further reducing property taxes after the regular session ended was the fear that the two signature-gathered questions, had they passed, would have cut too deeply into the funding for schools and tax-funded organizations, requiring support from the state, which it did not have.
That there was no guarantee that the two questions would have passed, their advocates were amenable to giving up the extremes to help create legislation that was more tax-limiting than existed earlier.
Not all legislators were pleased with the result. That the negotiations largely involved only leadership and the governor rankled some – components of the agreement were in place from conversations before convening the Legislature – while some Democrats thought the final tax reductions should be smaller.
We side with House and Senate members who rightly expected to play a role in shaping a solution and instead found themselves near the sidelines, but we’re pleased that the outcome looks to be something that respects property owners’ pocketbooks at the same time it supports the budgets of so many tax-funded organizations in Colorado, especially public schools.
