Federal tax for preparing homes for earthquakes

The state of California offers homeowners up to $3,000 toward a seismic retrofit that can protect the home from “walking” off its foundation in a big shaker.

That’s a good thing.

But then the federal government taxes that state grant as though it were income.

That’s not such a good thing. So Republican Rep. Paul Cook, R-Apple Valley, and a California colleague, Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Napa, introduced the Earthquake Mitigation Incentive and Tax Parity Act of 2017 to rectify the situation.

The California Residential Mitigation Program offers an Earthquake Brace + Bolt grant to help homeowners afford a seismic retrofit to lessen the potential for damage to their houses in an earthquake. The program is only for older houses that can benefit from being bolted to their foundations and having bracing added around the perimeter of the home’s crawl space.

The incentive payment of up to $3,000 covers much of a retrofit job that costs generally between $3,000 and $7,000. California already exempts the grants from state income tax.

Grants are available only for houses in specified ZIP codes that have a large number of houses that could use such a retrofit. ZIP codes in Claremont, Redlands and San Bernardino are eligible this year under the program, which adds new ZIPs each year. (Claremont’s 91711 and Redlands ZIPs 92346, 92354, 92359, 92373 and 92374 were all added to the eligibility list for 2017; eight ZIPs in San Bernardino — 92401, 92404, 92405, 92407, 92408, 92410, 92411 and 92415 — were already eligible.)

The program is popular with owners of older homes. So much so, in fact, that registration for 2017 is already closed, as of Feb. 27.

Cook’s sprawling 8th Congressional District incorporates plenty of quakeprone territory, from San Andreas Fault-adjacent cities in the San Bernardino Valley to Landers to Mammoth Lakes. Thompson’s district centers on Napa, where a 2014 earthquake damaged more than 1,500 homes.

They both know it’s important for older homes to be strengthened against the shaking that will come someday — and that it’s counterproductive for federal tax policy to eat into the incentives that the state of California offers by taxing them as income. Congress should join Cook and Thompson in providing federal tax relief.