Yesterday's special session followed the script.
Lawmakers restored the 1 percent property tax cap that the state Supreme Court lifted when it tossed Initiative 747. Tim Eyman and many Republicans objected that lawmakers should also have repealed all "banked capacity," not just the excess capacity created under the court ruling. But the majority plausibly countered that the session was about undoing the damage inflicted by the Court decision.
Well, not exactly, because they also passed a property tax deferral program of dubious benefit. One of the better dissections of the deferral concept is in this story by Rich Roesler in the Spokesman-Review.
People trying to save their home from foreclosure will do anything they can, said Dean Marshall, a Spokane accountant.
But if the situation's less dire, he said, avoid deferring taxes.
Here's why:
•For many homeowners, the savings are small. In Spokane last month, the median sales price for a home was $186,000. Spokane property tax – city, county, schools, emergency services, everything – totals $13.08 per thousand dollars of assessed value. For that median-price home, that's $2,433 a year.
The maximum reduction for such a home under the program Gregoire is proposing would be $608 a year, or about $50 a month.
"It's overly complicated for a trivial benefit," said Whitworth University economics professor Richard Schatz. "People are not losing their houses because they can't pay a quarter of their property taxes. They're losing their homes because their mortgage payment went from $900 to $1,300."
•Property taxes are deductible from federal taxes for people who itemize, Marshall points out. If the taxes are postponed, so is that federal tax savings.
•Interest under this program – unlike mortgage and home-equity interest – likely wouldn't be tax-deductible.
While there was plenty of justification for acting quickly on the tax cap, lawmakers needn't have hurried to introduce a new, unvetted tax plan likely to be used by some 5,500-6,000 homeowners - perhaps to their detriment.
No session, even one that's not about Tim Eyman, would be complete without a sideshow featuring Eyman. This one made the front page of the PI. Here's audio from Postman.
Plenty of coverage in the Olympian, AP in the Bellingham Herald, the Columbian, and the Seattle Times.
