Property owners are properly incensed when their assessments leap by double-digits and taxes head toward the ceiling.
This is fueling a rebellion across Idaho, especially in high-growth areas where breathtaking new construction of more expensive housing influences assessment values of adjoining properties as required by state law.
Bonner County in far north Idaho is the latest to react, and dramatically. Its county commissioners, acting as the Board of Equalization, simply rolled back assessments to 2005 values and declared new assessments "defective."
Whoa.
Satisfying as this preemptive action may be to Bonner County taxpayers, neither that move nor the special legislative session proposed by Gov. Jim Risch to ease property taxes by dipping into a state surplus is wise.
The assessment problem confronting Idaho counties is too complex for helter-skelter or hurried patchwork solutions.
Some of those urging panic solutions on public officials are guilty of ignoring the benefits of these higher assessments and taxes.
For starters, many expect, or at least accept, enlarged or improved public services from government—even as they ask for lower assessments. The reality is that today's more expensive public services can't be funded with tax revenues of yesteryear's good ol' days.
And many of those anguished about higher assessments happily would demand even higher prices for their property if they decide to sell.
That said, remedies to the present assessment mechanism are needed.
In the same bipartisan fashion that lawmakers acted in imposing a two-year moratorium on coal-fired power plants, the Idaho Legislature's Republicans and Democrats can find a sensible solution to the property tax muddle.
One path not to take in this search is fiery speechmaking that blames "waste, fraud and abuse" for higher assessments. County assessors are simply bound by state law in their methodology, and if legislators don't like that, then the system must be redesigned.
Fully six months remain before the January opening of the state Legislature. Instead of allowing property tax reform to languish until the final days and hours of the session, as it did this year, lawmakers should develop ideas, exchange them with colleagues on both sides of the aisle and be prepared to slot the issue as the 2007 session's priority agenda item.
Far better to deliberate than to dash headlong and in panic into so-called solutions that at best are only a stopgap measures or political shams.
