Dan Walters: Parcel tax changes could be big battle in California Legislature

◼ It could become, in brief, the high-octane supermajority dust-up that legislative leaders want to avoid. - Dan Walters/Sacramento Bee

...Some (school) districts have successfully asked their voters to approve differing levels of tax on different kinds of property – lower ones for homes and higher ones for commercial properties and/or taxes based on square footage of properties.

Those variations have made some parcel taxes more closely resemble value-based levies of traditional property taxes. In a case involving the Alameda Unified School District, the 1st District Court of Appeal said those taxes violate a law requiring "uniform" rates of parcel taxes.

If the ruling prevails in the state Supreme Court, Alameda Unified and other districts that adopted parcel tax variations may have to refund many millions of dollars in revenues to commercial landowners.

They want the Legislature, therefore, to not only lower the threshold for approving parcel taxes, but validate the more creative, albeit illegal, ways in which such taxes have been levied and, perhaps, protect them from having to make the refunds.

Responding to those demands would make writing a parcel tax amendment much more complicated because it would bring business interests, seeing it as an assault on Proposition 13, into the political equation.

It could become, in brief, the high-octane supermajority dust-up that legislative leaders want to avoid....