Despite more than 60% of Kansans supporting constitutional limits on property tax valuations, Kansas Speaker of the House Dan Hawkins says the Kansas House of Representatives will not take up the amendment recently passed by the Senate tax committee.
According to State Affairs, Hawkins said late last week that even if the full Kansas Senate passes Concurrent Resolution 1603, it will not get a vote in the House.
“Hawkins (R-Wichita) said he didn’t think the House had enough support to pass the Senate Concurrent Resolution 1603, which would require a two-thirds approval,” the outlet reported. “He took a frequent stance of his: ‘We never put something up for a vote if we know it’s not going to pass.'”
There may be a lack of support among House members, but taxpayers like the idea.
In written testimony before the Senate Committee on Assessment and Taxation, Dave Trabert, CEO of the Kansas Policy Institute — which owns The Sentinel — noted that a recent public opinion poll conducted by SurveyUSA on behalf of Kansas Policy Institute shows overwhelming support for a valuation limit, with 64% of voters in favor and only 18% opposed. Support is consistent across all geographic and ideological perspectives. 
Trabert spoke in favor of the amendment — which would limit the annual valuation increase on real property and mobile homes to 3% — noting that property taxes in Kansas have increased exponentially for years.
Trabert said that — from 1997 through 2023, the last year for which numbers are available — taxes on residential properties in Kansas have increased 342%, and overall real estate taxes are up 296%. Over the same time period inflation has increased 80%.
Additionally, Trabert said the amendment is needed because residential property owners have had an increasingly large share of the burden shifted onto them.
“In 1997, residential property paid 39% of the property tax; now it pays 55%,” Trabert said.
Trabert noted in his written testimony that in 2022 and 2023, many counties saw double-digit valuation increases—some, like Anderson, Linn, and Wyandotte counties, more than 40% over two years.
“Most of those counties lost population over that period, but population loss is only part of the story,” Trabert wrote. “Some counties that gained population still suffered economic loss from people moving away. Johnson County, for example, had a net loss of $400 million in adjusted gross income from domestic migration, according to the IRS.”
Tax increases should be lower with valuation limits
While the amendment would not directly reduce taxes, it would likely result in taxes increasing at a much lower rate than in recent years.
The adjacent table from Trabert’s testimony shows that a 15% valuation increase typically results in about a 13% tax increase after local elected officials reduce the mill rate by about 1%. To achieve the same 13% tax increase with a 3% valuation limit, however, elected officials would have to raise the mill rate by more than 10%, and after years of (falsely) equating changes in mill rates with tax
changes, Traber said a 10% mill rate increase is very unlikely. They would likely increase the mill rate but by a much lower amount, and taxpayers would likely pay less than if they would without the limit on assessed valuation.
“Local elected officials’s false insistence that they’ve held the line on property tax increases by not raising mill rates much would have worked against them,” Trabert said. “The primary concern for many of them is getting re-elected, and they know that big hikes in mill rates would hurt their re-election chances. They likely would have increased mill rates, but taxpayers would still probably have considerable net savings.”
