The Property Tax Hotline

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You've got one. I got one. We all got one.
Notice that the county assessor went through the neighborhood and
decided just how much our house is worth again, and
there is a good chance it's more, in some cases,
a lot more. As the great baseball philosopher Yogi Barrow
once offered, it's deja vu all over again. My valuation

(00:22):
went up thirty three percent, even though according to Zilloh,
the Omaha metropolitan market average was one percent. I must
be in a different Omaha metropolitan market than my house.
It's the system. It's the formula we created thirty plus
years ago to equalize how schools get tax money without
taking up class time with a history lesson again, the

(00:45):
fine Nebraskans who served in the unicamera back when this
formula was put in place never imagined that our property
would ever grow in value as dramatically as it has.
But it also allowed for local governments to collect it.
Look at your property tax statement. Fifteen mouths get fed
by property taxes, and not a single one is outside

(01:07):
your county. The school district's, the city, the county, the
learning community, nrds six of the fifteen payoff bonds, and
by the way. Next time an elected official tells you
the bond they want us to approve will be retired,
try not to laugh. They've never retired a single one.
Just keep collecting forever and ever and ever. So. The

(01:29):
math is simple. The more property tax collected, the more
money for these operations. It's a scam. The public entity
gets more money without raising taxes. In fact, some mayors
and county commissioners might even insult you by saying I
actually lowered your taxes by trimming my levy. Such nonsense
requires us to shroud our anger with laughter, but again

(01:52):
try to suppress it. Along comes Jim Pillen, the son
of a Platte County sharecropper who parlayed a football scholarship
into a degree in veterinary science and then got a DVM,
came home and went to work. By his early thirties,
the Pillins built an agribusiness empire that includes vast swaths
of Nebraska real estate, and just like all of us,

(02:13):
his property taxes kept going up and up and up
and up. So when he decided to run for governor,
his campaign centered almost exclusively on lowering property taxes. In fact,
he promised it and man as he tried, took the
billion dollar surplus and plodded into extra funding for schools,
getting the state to take over funding of community colleges,

(02:35):
and clawing back cash his own departments had squirreled away
from previous budgets. But our property taxes just kept on rising.
He also upped the annual dump into the property tax
relief fund. Oh yeah, it gives each of us a
credit on our property taxes. But if the valuation goes
up and the tax bill with it, how can that

(02:56):
be sustained? It can't. We're up to one one billion
a year budgeted into the property tax relief bucket, while
the hole in the bottom of that bucket gets larger.
We're four years into Pillin's promise, which included a special
session of the legislature, and we all still keep getting
the love letter from the county assessor. His latest idea

(03:19):
is a bitching website log on, file your complaint, thousands
will The idea is to show the forty nine state
senators who can fix this, just how fed up we are.
But will anything change. I've known the governor a long time.
He's a patient man, disciplined. His weakness is Husker sports

(03:40):
but in every other walk of life, the man is
mentally tougher than trigonometry. This website, launched just months before
the election. One that rates him at least vulnerable, if
not in trouble, is his attempt to get this back
into the discussion. He wants those in unicameral races to
make promises about real property tax reform, and if they do,

(04:04):
he can leverage that in the next term. Pilon wants
to charge sales tax on more stuff, plow that into schools,
forcing either a cap on valuations or permanent cuts in
mill levies. He's seventy years old. This is likely his
last election. He's ready to hang property taxes around their
necks like millstones. He knows the feeling. He's been doing

(04:27):
it for four years.