This session of the North Dakota Legislature hasn't been short of issues. There's school financing, higher education budgets, cohabitation.
It's a rather long list.
The sleeper issue of the session, however, is the property tax.
The Legislature has been in denial about the property tax. Rather like a flood, no one has been prepared to address the property tax until it got so high that payers started feeling overwhelmed.
It's important to understand why the tax has gone up. One reason is that the state is more prosperous, and that means property values have risen. Because the property tax is based on market value, the tax has gone up.
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It's true that the property is worth more on the market, but that doesn't make it worth more to someone living on the property, or operating a business there. It only makes it more expensive.
While property values were relatively stable, that wasn't a problem. As they rose, though, so did property tax bills - even for marginal businesses and even for people on limited or fixed incomes.
These are the people most adversely affected by the property tax, and they made their views known during the legislative campaign. Around the state, candidates reported hearing about property taxes from middle- and lower- income voters.
While the threat of a tax revolt brought property taxes to the attention of lawmakers, it hasn't prompted them to assess the other reason that property taxes have gone up, and this is where the denial comes in.
The state Legislature, more than any other level of government, is responsible for higher property tax rates. This is so because the Legislature has consistently refused to meet its obligations to funding local schools, which have come to rely more and more heavily on the property tax, the only tax that schools can levy easily.
What's more, state support for a whole array of other programs, from highways to social services, hasn't kept pace with costs. In an effort to continue the level of services that voters demand, local officials have turned increasingly to the property tax.
So, it's a double whammy - higher values and higher rates.
Lawmakers try to avoid responsibility for this situation by pointing out that only local governments can levy property taxes, and that's true. There is only one statewide property tax, three quarters of a mill to support the UND Medical School.
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But that's not all. Lawmakers try to place blame for higher property taxes on local taxing districts. And they suggest a sledgehammer solution to this perceived problem. Local taxing authority should be limited.
Except that local taxing authorities are not the real culprit, as we have seen. Instead, it's the Legislature's failure to keep its part of the bargain, adequate funding for local schools.
It used to be that North Dakota was proud to fund schools at 70 percent of the cost of a pupil's education. But that was in our grandfather's day. This generation of lawmakers has let the figure sink to less than 50 percent. Even with a generous infusion of cash to fund the compromise reached last year, the gap won't be made up.
The real issue is not high property taxes, but the imbalance in the state's tax system. Legislators, who levy sales and income taxes, have refused to raise them to meet the state's responsibilities. Local taxing entities, especially schools, have responded in the only way they can - by raising property taxes.
Now, some lawmakers want to put strict limits on local taxing authority, suggesting that local governments can't be trusted. The ugly truth, however, is that it's the Legislature - not local governments and especially not school districts - that have failed property taxpayers.
The best property tax reform would be for the Legislature to provide full funding for schools. That might mean raising other taxes, which lawmakers have resolutely refused to do.
Of course, they don't have to. Local governments have raised taxes for them.
Getting someone else to do the dirty work is always a neat trick, and so far, the Legislature has gotten away with it.
