Gov. Jared Polis has called the state legislature into a special session aimed at building on recent property tax cuts and heading off a pair of ballot measures that opponents warn would be disastrous for government services, he announced Thursday.
The special session is set to begin Aug. 26. Lawmakers will need to meet for at least three days to pass any bills — and in the dog days of summer, with many soon leaving office, limiting its length will surely be the goal. Officials in recent days have outlined a potential $270 million property tax cut they hope will head off Initiatives 50 and 108.
Those ballot measures are being run by a conservative nonprofit, and they would cut taxes by billions of dollars and put a strict cap on property tax growth at the local level. Opponents warn they would have devastating consequences for government services.
Polis said he would not sign any legislation from the special session until the measures are formally pulled from the November ballot, as the conservative advocacy group Advance Colorado has agreed to do. The call comes after a week of building momentum for the special session, as opponents to the ballot measures weighed the devastating risk they see in them against their chances of passage by voters.
“Whatever the level of risk is — whether it’s a 50/50 chance it passes, or a 30% chance it passes — (these initiatives) would result in immediately reestablishing the budget stabilization factor (for schools), defunding higher education, gutting local transportation funding and much more,” Polis said in an interview with The Denver Post Thursday morning. “If we can find a way to provide a property tax cut that we can afford, that protects funding for our schools and special districts, we should certainly take the opportunity to do that.”
This will be the second special session Polis has called in the past 10 months to address property tax policy. In between, the legislature also met for its regular 120-day session during the winter and spring, in which property tax negotiations also played a defining role.
The regular session resulted in the passage of Senate Bill 233, a $1.3 billion cut that elected leaders hoped would lead to an armistice in the ongoing property tax wars.
But that deal broke down in the final days of the legislative session, leading to lingering distrust and sour feelings.
If passed, the initiatives filed by Advance Colorado would lower property tax rates across the state and strictly cap how much property tax revenue can grow in the future. Advocates argue those moves would stop runaway property tax bills if Colorado goes through another boom in home values.
The proposals spent the spring hanging over the legislature as a threat: Find a long-term solution to property tax reform, or let the voters decide in November. Many lawmakers thought they reached that solution with Senate Bill 233, a $1 billion cut to property tax rates that was signed into law and celebrated across political divisions. But negotiations with the initiatives’ backers’, the conservative advocacy organization Advance Colorado and business group Concern Colorado, broke down in the 11th hour of the last legislative session.
Advance Colorado’s Michael Fields has promised to pull the measures if lawmakers pass new reforms his group finds agreeable — but they would have to do it by the Sept. 6 deadline for petitioners to pull their measures, as the state’s ballot is set.
A commission on property tax policy, comprised of lawmakers, local elected officials, and others close to the issue, met Monday in the hopes of doing just that. Mark Ferandino, the governor’s budget director outlined proposed revisions that would amount to lower property tax collections of about $270 million, versus the estimated drop of more than $2.1 billion under Initative 108. Strong growth in property values would go a long way toward effectively erasing the deficit taxing entities would see, Ferandino said.
The new proposal for the special session would push down residential assessment rates by about three-tenths of a percentage point — worth about $100 a year for a $500,000 home with an average mill levy — on top of cuts already signed into law. It would also tighten the cap on property tax growth from 5.5% annually to 10.5% over a two-year assessment period. The cap would be 12% every two years for school district taxes.. It would begin for property tax year 2025, which is generally paid in 2026.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
