Proposed property tax initiative subject of Riverton meeting

by Marit Gookin

The Ranger, Via Wyoming News Exchange

RIVERTON —  As Wyoming property values have been increasing, so have Wyoming property taxes – leading to increasing concerns among some residents. 

Some of those residents have banded together into the Wyoming Property Tax Initiative, which has come up with a ballot initiative proposing a 50% property tax reduction for primary residences. 

On Wednesday morning, Jeff Martin from the tax initiative spoke to the Riverton Economic and Community Development Association about property taxes and the ballot initiative. 

“What the citizens’ initiative will do is give these people some tax relief in 2025,” explained Martin, a Lander resident and business owner. “People are being taxed out of their homes.” 

There are currently over 3,100 tax liens against homes in the state of Wyoming, Martin told attendees. According to the Wyoming Department of Revenue’s current list of delinquent taxpayers, published monthly, as of November 14, there were 43 commercial and residential Wyoming properties with delinquent taxes; roughly half of these appear to be associated with a business. 

The ballot initiative has received widespread support across the state, Martin said, noting that it now has over 500 circulators around the state and about 75% of the signatures it needs to be on the 2024 ballot. 

“This is a bill for the people, and the people can vote on this bill … Really what we’ve done is we’ve made a conversation in this state that we haven’t heard for 10 years.” 

The state has a significant amount of money put into savings and investment, Martin added, and a mechanism by which counties and municipalities can appropriate some of that funding. Property tax revenue does not go into the state of Wyoming’s general fund; primarily, property taxes support more local-level governmental bodies such as county government, city government, schools and districts. 

Some in the room, however, felt the issue of property taxes was slightly more complicated. 

“Are the services that you’re paying for worth what you’re paying for them, and are elected officials doing what they need to be doing with your dollars?” Moore said, is the question that people should be asking themselves. 

For example, he pointed out, across the state the majority of property tax revenue goes toward education, and Fremont County is no exception to that rule. 

Funding for education, former Speaker of the Wyoming House of Representatives and President of the Wyoming Senate Eli Bebout explained, is gathered locally via the mill levy, sent to Cheyenne, and then redistributed among the counties. This process means that wealthier counties help support the higher costs of education in Wyoming’s most rural school districts, added State Representative Ember Oakley. 

Teton County is what is known as a “recapture district;” a recapture district, the Wyoming Department of Education explains on its website, has “access to local revenues in excess of [its] guarantees” and “must rebate the excess to the state of Wyoming.” 

This additional funding helps support school districts on the opposite end of the financial spectrum – those that have less local revenue than their guaranteed level of funding. 

“They’re screaming out there; it’s about time they paid their way. We’ve been carrying them for years,” Bebout remarked about Teton County’s taxes. 

Teton County is the perfect example of the problems inherent to the ballot initiative’s flat 50% property tax reduction, Oakley remarked. 

“It’s not targeted enough at all. We have the richest county in the entire country, and they’re willing to pay these taxes – and this says they get 50% off,” she pointed out. 

Additionally, she said, cutting property taxes would mean cutting county and city budgets.

“That’s what funds your cities and counties and your towns … People are having these conversations about funding here in Riverton,” she continued, particularly with regard to its police department needing a larger budget – “and in some cases I think those same people are saying you should slash your [source of] funding for your city and your police department.” 

In the case of a $300,000 value home, she explained, the owner would pay about $2,400 a year in property taxes. Of that amount, $1,700 would go to education and only about $700 would go to the county government. Only a portion of that $700 would make its way back to the municipal government. 

“This slashes that in half; it would be absolutely devastating to your cities and your county,” Oakley said. 

Wyoming has no state income tax, she noted, and a relatively low sales tax that applies to the least amount of services of any state – and ranks 47th in the country for property tax rates, with only Hawaii, Colorado and Alabama having lower property taxes. 

The majority of the state’s tax revenue doesn’t come from its people at all, but from industry – and in particular, from the oil and gas industry. 

“If you have children, you’re not paying your tax burden in the state of Wyoming, not even close. It’s oil and gas,” she remarked. “The reality is, we run a good budget, but you also have to pay for yourself … What you’re saying is the people shouldn’t pitch in.” 

“We extract money from the people who extract resources,” commented Moore. “We export our taxes, and there comes a time when we may not be able to do that.” 

Oakley isn’t opposed to property tax relief in some cases, but feels that it needs to be far more targeted than the ballot initiative’s flat 50% reduction for all Wyoming property owners for one year. 

She also pointed out that the state already has low income tax relief programs, and that “rhetoric about old people losing their homes” usually fails to take this into account. 

Instead of a flat one-time property tax reduction, Oakley said, she favors the measures outlined in House Bill 0003, sponsored by the revenue committee of which she is a member. 

The bill outlines that property owners who are 65 years old or older and who have paid Wyoming residential property taxes for at least 30 years can apply for a 50% property tax reduction on one residential property once per year. 

“I think the system’s broken,” Martin said. “What are we going to do to give people in the state of Wyoming that kind of relief?”

If this initiative fails, he added, the next one will be for a 100% property tax reduction.