The Utah House of Representatives has spent the last few weeks working on a designed to take additional property taxes from high value school districts and redistribute it to low value and/or high growth school districts. The end result would of course be to provide additional funding to school districts who aren’t earning enough revenue through property taxes.
This proposal could have reallocated millions of dollars in funding raised through Park City area property taxes, and headed for Park City, South Summit, and North Summit School Districts, and instead spread it across several other districts all over the State. But according to District officials, it’s not money that any of the three Park City area districts can afford to lose. The Park Record even quotes one official as saying his district has just reached the point where they could afford to start fixing existing infrastructure.
To me the problem is actually deeper than just the dollar signs. Residents within the Park City school district have voted to pay a higher property tax rate to support and fund the school district. There’s nothing stopping any of the other school districts from voting on such measures to increase funding from within. And if additional funds are truly necessary, that’s what should happen.
The second half of the issue is that the state already receives and redistributes significant amounts of money from Park City property taxes, and in the words of one school board member “If the state felt they could come after property taxes and equalize them to other areas of the state, what’s to prevent them from taking locally approved taxes such as recreation-district taxes and fire-district taxes? Where would it end?”
Fortunately, the bill failed to pass with the requisite number of votes. But this will most likely not be the last time that property tax equalization is brought up.
