At the June 27, 2024, meeting of the Wyandotte County Board of Commissioners, community members in attendance were upset for at least two reasons.
First, the commissioners were late to their own meeting. One commenter said they had waited 45 minutes for the meeting to start.
The second cause for indignation was a proposal to exceed “revenue neutral” in the following year’s budget — government-speak for raising property taxes.
Tori Walker, a music teacher, said her home in the Morris neighborhood was affordable when she bought it five years prior. That changed, she said, when the “lurking monster” of property taxes reared its head.
“Any extra money I make this summer with little side jobs won’t really benefit my family,” she said. “I won’t be able to pay it toward debt, or toward savings, or even maybe to go to the pool or buy school supplies. No, I’ll be paying it to Wyandotte County.”
After three hours and dozens of testimonies like Walker’s, applause rang out when the commission voted unanimously against its proposal to hike property taxes.
What would cuts cost?
Required public hearings like this have taken place across the state of Kansas as residential property tax rates have ballooned. Last year’s drawn-out battle over a sweeping tax cut package did not include the level of property tax relief many had wanted. This year, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say they want to fix that.
But although frustration with the unpopular tax is widespread, the appetite for cutting it is not universal. Local governments rely heavily on property taxes to fund schools, emergency services, public utilities and infrastructure projects.
“Our primary functions as local government is to keep you safe with our public safety programs and to keep your roads open and your water flowing,” said Spencer Duncan, a lobbyist for the League of Kansas Municipalities. “And if we can’t do that, then that obviously becomes a real problem.”
Duncan is worried that state lawmakers might try to force cities and counties to lower their tax rates, which could starve local services like fire departments and road crews.
For some, promises of major tax reductions recall not-too-distant memories of budgetary stress during the governorship of Republican Sam Brownback. Tom Barker, a Lawrence homeowner who’s worked as a social studies teacher since 2012, associated the signature Brownback tax cuts with growing class sizes and belt-tightening bordering on asphyxiation.
“The biggest challenge is just being able to have the time to be able to help kids and really address their needs,” he said.
Because of staff shortages, Barker said his classes have too many students to give each of them the individual attention they might need to keep up.
Not if, but how
The idea of tax cuts has bipartisan support in the Legislature this session. But even lawmakers within each party disagree about the best way to go about it. There are several ways to lower property taxes, each with their own drawbacks.
The Kansas House has proposed lowering the state mill levy, a form of property tax dedicated to funding public schools. Even a modest reduction from 20 mills to 18.5 would result in hundreds of millions of education dollars lost, according to estimates by the state Division of Budget.
On KCUR’s Up to Date in January, Republican Senate President Ty Masterson assured that any reductions to revenues for schools would be made up for in the State General Fund.
