We warned that no good would come of Gov. Polis waiting until the last week of the legislative session to offer his plan to save homeowners from skyrocketing tax bills next year of 30%-70%, and indeed it is no good at all.
It’s a bait and switch, with Polis and the Democrat-controlled legislature offering homeowners a tax hike reprieve for 10 years, but only if voters agree to surrender a chunk of their Taxpayer Bill of Rights tax refunds, and let government keep an bigger slice of their income in the future.
The devil is definitely in the details, as The Colorado Sun explains at the bottom of their article.
If the legislature passes Polis’s plan before session ends this week, their solution would be to put the measure to voters on the November ballot so they can later blame the whole mess on voters instead of themselves.
The ballot question would say the state gets to keep hundreds of millions of TABOR refunds that would go to schools and local governments, to replace the extra money they would have gotten from the property tax hikes.
In other words, it’s a tax hike no matter who wins.
And, voters would have to agree to let the state keep even more of their TABOR refund in the future.
And, school districts and local government would still be allowed to jack up property taxes on homeowners.
It’s a screw you — screw you proposal that’s going to take even more of your hard-earned money next year while teachers and first responders will still complain they don’t’ make a living wage.
Colorado Democrats are basically telling people their property taxes don’t have to go up as much as long as those people give more of their money to Government. So they are increasing our taxes to lower our taxes?
What the hell are we even witnessing?#copolitics #coleg— Mr T 2 (@GovtsTheProblem) May 1, 2023
Ironically, the Democrat-controlled state legislature wasted precious time this session pretending to do something to make housing more affordable.
The rent control measure that mercifully failed because it would have driven up costs, and the Big Government takeover of local zoning in the name of affordable housing, just to name a few failures.
If Polis’s extortion ploy fails and property taxes go through the roof, so will housing costs. Because renters lease housing from people who own property.