Epp Makes the Pierre paper
(Click on image to enlarge)The full article by Kate Turnbow should be on-line in a few hours at the Capitol Journal Website. In the meantime, you can read the teaser above.
(Click on image to enlarge)The full article by Kate Turnbow should be on-line in a few hours at the Capitol Journal Website. In the meantime, you can read the teaser above.
Comments
MHS: Ignorance is still prevail ant among people like you. If you knew anything about property taxes, you would know that the free ride for large developers is rampant in the present system. Why in the world do you think they are so opposed to Amendment D? Because Amendment D eliminates their free ride. I would not expect you MHS to understand this.
Under Amendment D, those working families, farmers, ranchers, small businesses will get to keep their properties.
Amendment D is real reform. It's too bad people like you can't understand this.
So what is it MHS? What is your answer to the people who are being taxed out of their homes by a confiscatory system that doesn't care whether you can pay your taxes or not? They will just take your home, business, ranch or farm for back taxes and sell it to someone else. No, you don't have an answer, you just want to sit around and bitch about Napoli.
Best wishes,
Todd
P.S. Have we ever met?
Your personal attack is much the same smoke screen you used in the thread we had on Blogmore some months ago and, per your usual tactics, did not offer a single fact to refute the mass of evidence of the failure of Prop 13 over the past 30 years in CA. The law has been voted on no less than 18 times since its passage, which is exactly the chaos that faces S.D. if STOP passes.
I also spent 5 years doing taxation comparisons of our climate here vs. other states for GOED under Gov. Mickelson, helping successfully lure dozens of companys to our state. I only mention this as you felt compelled to accuse me of being "anti-business" on Blogmore.
Prop 13 is one of the most studied local goverance issues in America. Did any of you "best tax minds in the state" even bother to read some of the literature? You say STOP will benefit working families, farms etc. when even the University of California at Berkely, hardly a conservative institution, says the opposite it true. Commerical propery owners are by far the largest beneficiaries of assesment freezes since, on average, commercial property is sold far, far less often than residential property.
Young farmers and young families will be huge losers under STOP and corporations and property speculators will be the big winners. Every major corporation in California knew this when Prop 13 was passed and they still led the fight against it, due to the harm they felt it would cause the state's economy.
How can you possibly say a developer is getting a free ride today? Under STOP, a developer can buy farmland at the market price for cornland, not shopping malls, sit on it for a number of years, then develop and sell it at a huge increase in value, having only been taxed in the interim as cheap farm land since STOP will freeze his assesment the whole time he owns it, despite the value skyrocketing. It doesn't take a tax expert to figure out this example, does it? Yet, you and your supporters have a different story every time you speak.
What's been the result of Prop. 13 / STOP in CA? It is the most volatile real estate market in the world, with enormous boom and bust cycles. We already have to deal with the cycles of agriculture in our state, we cannot afford an artificially imposed tax mess on top of that.
The system we have has problems, no doubt. I agree with you that the 150% rule is a joke. But, to throw everything to the wind and impose a system that has failed every other place it's been tried is just too much.
I know I won't make a dent in the Senator's opinion, but I hope the rest of the loyal War College student body will take the time to learn a few things about STOP before they vote.
stick to sodomized religious virgins, Napoli.
what a buffoon.
Under STOP, the longer you hold the property, the greater the benefit, agreed? The idea is that long-term owners of property such as, as you state, the elderly and farmers don't get hit with increasing assesments.
Here's two real-world examples where your logic is wrong. 1. You assume a farmer never buys more land. The size of the average farm in Eastern South Dakota has grown nearly eight-fold since the 1960's, with the average place growing from around 100 acres to over 800. Every time a farmer adds to his operation, he'll pay at the new value of the new land. The result is that his new quarter will be taxed at a much higher rate than his home quarter, although they may be identical in terms of crop production.
Here's a another example of the unintended consequences of STOP. One of the most valuable pieces of property in Sioux Falls is Minnehaha Country Club. It's been there since the 30's. If STOP had been in place the last 70 years, the wealthy member of the Club would be paying far lower taxes on their golf course than the average homeowner in Sioux Falls.
How does that qualify as real tax relief for working families, the elderly and farmers?
As I stated, the system needs work. Here a just a few ideas:
1. Put in place a farm exemption similar to the current one for homeowners. The owner of the property must make, say 70% of his income from the farm to qualify. That would give tax relief to working farmers and not give a break to wealthy MN guys buying land here for hunting.
2. Amend the 150% rule to include the above scheme. That would create two classes of ag land: production based or recreation based.
These are ideas just off the top of my head. No doubt the Governor and Legislature will have more.
As I said before, don't throw out everything we have in favor of a failed experiment from California know as Proposition 13.
The suggestions offered here by mhs show his understanding of Amendment D and the havoc it could create. As a South Dakota property owner and farmer, I hope that someone at the state level seriously considers his ideas.
I've seen too many instances where people didn't question an issue and then wondered what happened when it bit them afterwards.
What you don't know CAN hurt you.
From Wikipedia:
Owners of commercial real estate have also benefited: if a corporation owning commercial property (such as a shopping mall) is sold or merged, but the property stays deeded to the corporation, ownership of the property can effectively change hands without triggering Proposition 13's provision that fixes the amount of tax based on the property's resale value. Since many properties are nominally owned by shell companies whose sole assets are the properties in question, this has led to situations that have struck many commentators, such as Steve Lopez and Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times, as absurd and unfair. For example, the Times has reported that the property tax bill of the historic Capitol Records building in Hollywood is approximately five cents per square foot, while a small house assessed at $300,000 may pay up to 60 times that on a per-square-foot basis.