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January 31, 2024

The Texas legislature recently passed a law creating three elected positions on the board of directors of the county agency that controls property taxes. This was done to placate voter anger over property taxes, but will not make any actual changes in the way things operate. 

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Property taxes fund just about everything in Texas. Property taxes are assessed at the county level. Each county has a County Assessing District. Every year, the county appraisal district will send everyone a property value assessment. Then they will look at all the different taxes that “need” to collected and then set the property tax rate to get the tax money they want. These decisions are supervised and approved by the board of directors. The board of directors was formerly comprised of representatives from each entity that has taxing authority. In Texas these entities are usually school districts and city governments. So the decisions on how much taxes to collect have historically been made only by the people who get to spend the taxes, and never included any representation for the people paying taxes. This has led to property tax bills invariably increasing year to year, regardless of economic circumstances in the U.S. or local economy, resulting in angry voters calling for property tax reform. Texas has only given voters the runaround on reform. One of their favorite dishonest tricks is to have the property value assessor increase the value of your property beyond market conditions. Then the board of directors picks a property tax rate that provides an increase in taxes collected, but has a lower percentage rate than last year, so they can claim that while everyone’s tax bill increases, that they “lowered” taxes, because the percentage rate went down by a couple percentage points. My house, that I bought during the height of the housing market crash at the beginning of Obama’s term, has increased in value every year since I bought it. I first paid $166K for it. About eight years later, I had a realtor assess what we could sell our house for, since we were hoping to downsize, and were told that if we were lucky we could get 130K. The county assessor said my house would sell for over $250K. There is a process where you can dispute the property value the county appraiser assigns to your house, but everyone I know who has done it, says the end result is always the same. The taxed value of your house still increases, but not as much, and it never reflects actual market value.

The Texas Legislature made changes a few years ago to provide relief to angry voters. This came in the form of a law that if the property tax rate increases too much in a calendar year, it goes to the voters for approval. This was fought tooth and nail by city governments and school boards, who wield more influence than the average voter, but passed. However, this hasn’t changed anything. It sounds like it would help, but this has caused the county assessing districts to double down on their trick of raising assessed property values, while maintaining or dropping the tax rate, while still collecting more taxes.

This year, the Texas Legislature passed a law requiring that the 50 most populus counties have three elected people on their Board of Directors of the County Appraising District. In fact, the law just recently passed, and the deadline to file to be on the ballot is less than three weeks away. After thoroughly researching what it is these elected officials will be able to do, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is just another trick by the Texas Legislature to get us to stop complaining to them about our high property taxes.

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First off, there are two things that will disqualify you from running for this office, (beyond the disqualifications that most political offices share). They are:

1) Have not worked professionally in property appraising in the past year.

2) Have never disputed your property tax assessment in the past three years.

Both of these are things I would want in my representative on the county appraisal district’s board of directors. I want someone with relevant knowledge and who is willing to fight for lower taxes. But anyone who has the qualifications or inclination to do so is disqualified. This doesn’t sound like the Texas Legislature wants reform.

When I read the responsibilities of these positions, they were to approve the county tax budget and to come to quarterly meetings. The time and place of the meetings would be set by the property value appraiser. They could have more meetings, and if they don’t like the voters, will specifically pick the most inconvenient time for the voters’ representatives. For the meetings to proceed, they only need a majority of board members there. This means that for the most populated counties, the voters representatives could completely miss the meetings and binding legal decisions could still be made by all the representatives of the taxing entities.

There is also no compensation for this position, which, if they only have to show up to eight meetings for their two-year term, sounds fair, but it also means that the only people who will be elected to this are those who are desperate for power or desperate to be elected.