Utah’s Property Tax System: Its Not Broken But Could Be Improved
Full Personal Disclosure: I am currently employed by the Davis County Assessor Office as a Certified Residential Appraiser. This blog post represents my own opinion only.
KVNU’s For The People blog posted the entirety of an article by the Utah Foundation explaining Utah’s property tax system and how it works.
Utah’s “Truth in Taxation” property tax law has proven to be an excellent restriction on the growth of this tax for Utahns. Every home or business owner should read the Utah Foundation’s brief on how it works.
Are there steps that could be taken to ensure Utah’s property tax burden is distributed more fairly? Definitely.
1. Counties should be required to re-assess every parcel within their borders every year to ensure problems like those in the 2007 assessment of southern Davis County don’t happen again. Obviously this would require that assessor offices in each of the counties be adequately funded and staffed.
2. Utah’s status as a non-disclosure state for real estate transactions needs to be changed. All property sales should be public record as is the standard in nearly every other state in our country. The current system ensures an unfair tax break for high-end properties and a higher tax burden for owners of average or smaller homes.
3. Better enforcement or revamping of greenbelt exemptions should be examined. Many large property owners and developers are bearing far less than their fair share of the tax burden because they take advantage of greenbelt status.
4. The availability of circuit breaker property tax exemptions for destitute home owners should be expanded. We shouldn’t hear of people being taxed out of their homes in our state because of increasing property taxes.
Thanks for KVNU/FTP and the Utah Foundation for some excellent and useful information!
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What do you mean by taking advantage of greenbelt status?
Comment by Voice of Utah — February 27, 2008 @ 10:11 am
Greenbelt status is meant to provide tax relief for farmers who have large pieces of land that aren’t going to be used for residential or commercial development. These parcels shouldn’t be taxed based on their market value assessment as other parcels are.
Some developers or large land owners throw a horse on their land and call it agricultural so they won’t have to pay their fair share of taxes on it while they are preparing to develop.
When land goes out of greenbelt status so it can be developed they only have to pay five years worth of the back taxes on the full market value of the land.
Greenbelt status was never meant to be used as a property tax shelter for developers or owners of large residential estates.
BTW…Thank you for your question. I live with this stuff every day so sometimes I’m not great at fully explaining my reasoning on when I’m blogging about it!
Comment by Jeremy Manning — February 27, 2008 @ 10:58 am