2005 House Bill 5097 ↩

Senate Roll Call 525: Passed

To eliminate a cap on the maximum amount that property tax assessors can raise the assessment of commercial rental property due to a higher occupancy rate, if the assessment had been previously lowered as a result of a lower occupancy rate. A recent Supreme Court ruling held that raising these assessments faster than inflation violates the Constitutional tax cap put in place by Proposal A in 1994, which limits assessment increases to five percent or the rate of inflation, whichever is less. The bill gets around this by replacing the property tax on commercial rental property with an identical “specific tax” proposed in House Bill 5096.