Editor’s Note: a guest post by state representative Roger Wilder, a Republican from Livingston Parish.

Lowering property taxes would be easier if the Louisiana State Constitution wasn’t in the way, so let’s fix that!

Did you know that the LA State Constitution FORCES over-taxing of our property taxes?

HB 521 and 570 – a constitutional amendment and statutory companion – are the primary bills that I am sponsoring this session. They aim to remove that ridiculous mandate. Both bills passed House Ways and Means Committee and the House Civil Law Committee UNOPPOSED, and yesterday, they both passed from the House Floor 95-0.

We have all heard from local commissions, boards and other taxing districts that they “have to” roll forward and max out their millages to keep their maximum millage rate approved by voters. This pair of bills is aimed at stopping this “millage grab.”

In layman’s terms, here is how it happens:

One quick thought first. Let’s assume you have a credit card with a $10,000 credit limit. You typically charge $500-$1500 on it monthly and typically pay it off monthly or over two months. You never max it out, but you absolutely want and need that $10,000 credit line just in case you have a roof leak, an engine issue on your car or any type of emergency. Now, imagine the bank calls you and tells you that if you do not MAX OUT your card once a year, your credit limit drops to $1500. Would you stay with that bank? Probably not.

Back to property taxes and another example:

Let’s create a fire district together. We are the fire chief, and we want to start a new fire district. We propose 10 mills (for 10 years) for the newly created district. The residents within the district vote on our proposal and approve it. The residents have given us a credit line (of up to 10 mills) to run our fire district.

We write our budget and turn it in to the local Tax Assessor, who in turn runs it through the State Legislative Auditor. We are informed that, per our budget, we will only need to charge 6.0 mills to run our fire district. That is what we expected. We never wanted to charge the full 10 but need it to be there in the event of a flood, a hurricane or another emergency or disaster that could require additional expenses above the normal operating budget.

Now, let’s assume that all things stay equal in the district, and we have the same budget. One would expect that the fire district should stay at 6.0 mills.

And it should. However, this is where the Louisiana Constitution forces over-taxation.

The Louisiana State Constitution mandates that, in each parish, re-assessments are to occur every 4 years. This is when the tax assessors re-evaluate local assessments. In conjunction, the Constitution also mandates that, in at least one of those 4 years between the re-assessments, local districts roll-forward and charge the maximum millage, or the taxing authority loses their maximum millage (their full credit line). This means that if a taxing district does not roll-forward and over-tax their citizens(even when it is not budgetarily necessary), their new millage limit becomes the highest that they have charged in any one year between assessments. This makes no sense.

Voters in a taxing district have given that district the authority to tax them up to a certain millage, but the Louisiana State Constitution steps in and now trumps the voters and mandates the districts to over-tax the residents or lose what those same residents have already voted in.

In the case of our imaginary fire district, while we do not need more than 6.0 mills, we now have a choice to make:

Choice 1 – Charge the 6.0 mills all 4 years, and the constitution mandates that the new max millage is 6.0 (so we no longer have the “up to” 10 mills in the event of an emergency).
Choice 2 – Roll forward and max out the millage (to 10 mills) at least one year in between re-assessments, simply to keep the credit line and ability to have emergency resources if needed in the future.

Because of the Louisiana Constitution, we are constantly paying higher taxes than we should be paying. In many cases, our taxes are sitting in surplus funds because the taxing authority “had to” roll forward.

It is time to change this part of the Constitution and lower our property taxes.

See the attached videos for clips from my presentations, with these analogies, in House Ways and Means, House Civil Law, and on the House Floor.

A special thank you to Representative Stephanie Hunter Berault for co-authoring this legislation and for being actively involved through the process and also to Lafourche Parish Tax Assessor Wendy Lauga Thibodeaux for assisting with this legislation.