The Kansas Senate Committee on Assessment and Taxation restored the revenue-neutral transparency protections to a bill passed by the Kansas House of Representatives by a vote of 115-6. The bill would have rewarded local governments for raising taxes while stripping those provisions from property tax increases.
House Bill 2396 removed the “Truth in Taxation” bill’s revenue-neutral requirements — which require county clerks to send notices to taxpayers of every taxing subdivision notifying them of a proposed increase and the time and date of a hearing at which the entire tax increase would be voted upon.
HB2396 instead would have replaced those requirements with a “protest petition” in which voters would have 30 days following the date the governing body of a taxing jurisdiction certifies to the county clerk the amount of property tax to be levied to sign a protest petition.
The bill would have required a number of signatures equal to at least 10 percent of the votes cast for president in the most recent general election for the protest petition to take effect. In that case, the taxing entity would still be able raise taxes, as it would be “limited to a budget with property taxes from the prior year, as adjusted for inflation, new construction, and certain bond payments, (emphasis added).
The bill also would have established a $60 million “Acknowledging Stewardship of Tax Revenue and Appropriations (ASTRA) Fund” which would make additional payments to local governments which did not exceed revenue increase limits.
The substitute bill, which passed out of committee on March 18, 2025, and was sent to the full Kansas Senate, restored the Truth in Taxation revenue-neutral requirements and kept the protest petition option.
Dave Trabert, CEO of the Kansas Policy Institute — which owns The Sentinel — testified in opposition to HB2396 in the Senate committee and opposed the removal of the revenue-neutral requirements.
“Revenue neutral is working,” Trabert said. “It is actually doing what was just discussed. It is constraining government spending — 2,300 entities in this last year did not exceed revenue neutral.”
Trabert said—after presenting the Senate with nearly 70 pages of testimony that included a list of the taxing entities that are not increasing taxes this year—that there has been an increase in local governments actually holding the line on taxation rather than mouthing platitudes about mill rates while using valuation increases to raise taxes.
“It was 52% (remaining revenue neutral) within the first year,” he said. “Now it’s 62% of the taxing authorities not increasing.”
Trabert noted that it wasn’t just small entities either staying neutral or keeping increases under 4 percent, but some of the largest in the state.
“It’s a lot of large entities like Wyandotte County, Riley County, Ford County, and 44 others,” Trabert said. “Over 200 cities did not exceed revenue neutral, including Kansas City, Salina Hutchinson, Leavenworth, Emporia, Lewisburg, liberal Abilene, Junction City, and Spring Hill.”
House overwhelmingly votes to remove transparency
Kansas State Rep. Samantha Poetter Parshall (R-Paola) was one of only 6 members of the Kansas House who voted against HB2396. The others were Ford Carr, (D-Wichita); Ken Corbet, (R-Topeka); Brett Fairchild, (R-St. John); Fred Gardner, (R-Garnett); and Bill Rhiley, (R-Wellington). One hundred and fifteen members voted for the bill.
Poetter Parshall, who also sits on her local school board said in a phone interview that revenue-neutral has had an effect on the composition of local government entities as well.
“So when revenue neutral first went into place, Miami County had three county commissioners up for reelection, two of them did not retain their seats,” she said. “And then the next go-round, we had two up for election, and one of them did not retain their seat, and the other one only won by eight votes. So we flipped the entire county commission, and then USB 368, we flipped that entire school board, so we now have a four to three majority on it.”
Poetter Parshall said she attributed those changes directly to the Truth in Taxation law as the outgoing members of those entities “just kept voting to raise taxes.”
What is truth in taxation / revenue-neutral?
Local officials have long maintained they have been “holding the line” on property taxes, referring only to mill levy changes while ignoring the property tax hikes due to valuation changes. This has created an ‘honesty gap’ in taxpayers’ minds.
For example, Overland Park property taxes jumped 498% between 1997 and 2024, and the mill rate increased by 56%. The 442-point difference is the honesty gap.
In fact, some of the more populous counties have increased property taxes by more than 200 percent, and some cities have raised taxes as much as 300 percent since 1997, and Mitchell County, which has seen a 17% population decrease, raised taxes by 425% over the same time period.
The Kansas revenue-neutral law was modeled after Truth in Taxation legislation in Utah and Tennessee, which have had property tax transparency in place for over 30 years, resulting in some of the lowest effective tax rates in the nation.
