It’s time to bring soaring property taxes back to Earth

Now that mid-term elections are behind us, Texans who own homes, rent apartments or run businesses should turn their attention to Austin for the next legislative session. Many important issues will be addressed, but few of them affect all 27 million Texans as much as our confusing, broken property tax system.

Property taxes across Texas seem to be constantly increasing, leaving residents near-helpless in fighting the rising cost of living. Now is the time to fix that.

During the last three legislative sessions, leaders in both chambers put forward good proposals to promote more transparency and accountability. None were enacted. We look forward to working with Rep. Dennis Bonnen, who is likely to become the next speaker of the House, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Gov. Greg Abbott to help make the American dream of homeownership more attainable for Texans.

A good place to start is reforming the property appraisal process at the local level. In its current form, the system forces some, like Stacy Fuller, to give up the home they’ve lived in for decades.

Fuller is a widow who hoped to spend her retirement in her Fort Worth home of some 60 years. But $4,400 in annual property taxes made her pack her bags for a lower-tax city near the Texas-Arkansas border.

“I would like to still be in Fort Worth. My daughter and grandchildren and greatgrandchildren are there, and now it’s a four-hour drive to see them,” she told the

Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “But I needed to be able to live on Social Security and my pension. I knew by the time I reached 65 the property taxes would take my entire pension check to cover. It’s sad to work so long, to have a paid-for house and find you can no longer afford to live in it if you retire.”

Property owners like Fuller can contest their appraisals, if they have the knowhow. But doing that year after year, with no guaranteed result, is not an effective solution for everyday Texans.

We need meaningful property tax reform for the entire state that promotes transparency and gives citizens a say in how much government they are willing to finance. If cities wish to raise property taxes beyond a certain threshold, they should be required to seek voter approval.

Opponents of tax relief say that big tax hikes are necessary to fund education. But schools are already well-funded in Texas, which spends 52 percent of general revenue on primary and secondary education. The Texas Public Policy Foundation found that after adjusting for inflation, total education spending in the state has increased 29.7 percent since 2005, while per-pupil funding is up 7.6 percent.

They also found that much of those funds went not to teachers but administrators and other non-teaching staff. From 1993 to 2015, the number of teachers grew by 56 percent while the number of nonteaching staff grew by 66 percent.

Lawmakers should certainly pursue reforms that would deliver access to greater educational opportunities, but simply increasing the amount of taxpayer money we funnel to schools is more likely to contribute to administrative bloat than to student learning. Before demanding more tax money to pay for an education system that is lagging, Texas should address these issues and have a solid plan.

With property tax collections nearly double what they were in 1997, enough is enough.

Now is the time for fed-up taxpayers to make their voices heard — and every voice count. A recent bond referendum that would have raised property taxes in San Angelo by nearly 12 percent was defeated by just two votes.

As the 2019 legislative session approaches, Texans should contact our lawmakers in Austin to encourage sensible limits on property tax hikes. In the words of Ronald Reagan, “When you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat.”