Friday, March 11, 2005 | 11:05 a.m.
CARSON CITY -- Legislators have pared down the more than 20 ideas for property tax reform to three basic concepts, leaders said Thursday.
"After hours of discussion, we came down to essentially three ways to do this," said Assembly Minority Leader Lynn Hettrick, R-Gardnerville.
Still, cautioned Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, the ideas will be formed into "skeleton bills" that could change dramatically after they are put under the microscope.
Several lawmakers said they're happy to have models in place that their attorneys say would likely hold up in court. But they cautioned that the plans aren't easy to digest.
One of the ideas involves a mathematical formula so complex that leaders themselves said they aren't comfortable with it yet. It would establish a baseline year for tax assessments and make adjustments so that, over time, homes in different tax districts would see basically the same increases in their taxes.
It's "pretty complicated," but it's also "very defensible constitutionally," Titus said. She pointed out, however, that homes with higher assessed values would see higher tax increases under the formula than less expensive homes.
Legislators still are looking at a cap on assessed values, though they aren't sure of how much.
And they are looking at freezing the assessed values for one year and then capping them at the rate of inflation another year. It would be a short-term fix while they worked out a long-term solution to put in the state constitution.
All of the options also could involve a separate formula that would create a baseline tax year to help assess new or improved properties.
Staff members have publicly worried that anything that limits assessed values might violate the state constitution's uniform and equal clause, which requires all property to be taxed in a uniform manner.
"You have to have a way to bring new property on to adjust it to the base tax year," Hettrick said.
Titus and others said they aren't willing to rule anything out yet, but they're concerned about putting a plan in place that would confuse voters.
"I think that's a huge problem," Titus said.
Others say it's better to choose the best plan and simply outline for residents on their bill how much they would pay under the current system versus how much they would pay under the new system.
"People don't have to understand the formula," said Carole Vilardo, president of the Nevada Taxpayers Association. "They have to understand how the value is realized, not the formula."
Lawmakers unveiled the plans after coming under some criticism for holding a series of closed-door meetings with staff members.
Titus, who has said the meetings could have been held out in the open, spoke on the Senate floor Thursday, saying she attended the closed meetings "against my better judgment."
She railed against an editorial in the Las Vegas Review-Journal that criticized her for attending the closed meetings, saying she went in the spirit of bi-partisanship.
"But enough is enough," she said. "The public is tired of worrying," about the potential of skyrocketing property tax values.
"We have got to move forward," she said.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno, said it was the staff of the Legislature that called the meetings, not the leadership. He said the staff wanted direction because there were 21 bills on various suggestions on how to settle the issue.
He warned legislators who are eyeing other offices that "everybody will not like the outcome" of the property tax debate.
For now, staff members are only writing bills based on the three solutions outlined Thursday. But Hettrick said legislators can still share their ideas with the joint committee looking at property taxes, which could then direct staff members to write a bill.
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