Who saw this coming? Oh, right, everybody:
Across California, businesses are paying a far smaller share of property tax than homeowners since Proposition 13 was approved because of legal loopholes that allow companies to avoid a reassessment upon a change of ownership, a new study says.
The disparity exists in virtually all of California's 58 counties, according to the 122-page report by the California Tax Reform Association and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. The full study is available here.
In some counties, residential property is shouldering two-thirds of the property tax load, sharply higher than when tax-cutting Proposition 13 was approved more than 30 years ago. (CapWkly)
The Right won this battle by showing commercials of little old ladies getting kicked out of their homes b/c they couldn't pay their taxes. But the fact of the matter is that Prop 13, rather than shifting the burden off of home owners, has been shifted to them from commercial property.
Asm. Tom Ammiano is working on a bill to close the loophole that allows mega corporations to merge or sell off a subsidiary and avoid re-assesment. The issue here is that some of the biggest buildings in the state are still being assessed at 1978 levels despite the fact that they've changed ownership, sometimes slowly, sometimes through a quick corporate move. But Prop 13 is rigid and won't allow us to update the values on these corporate hijinks, and the homeowners pay ever increasing portions of the property tax pie.
This is fundamentally unfair, and it exposes the truth behind Prop 13. It is a corporate dream come true, and anything but a friend to the people of California. |
