By Victor Joecks, Las Vegas Review-Journal, April 1, 2025
Nevada Democrats would like to increase property taxes. They just don’t want the electoral blowback for raising property taxes.
Last week, Assemblywoman Natha Anderson, D-Sparks, presented Assembly Joint Resolution 1. Currently, Nevada reduces the taxable value of homes using a 1.5 percentage point annual depreciation rate for 50 years. So if a home is 10 years old, its taxable value is reduced by 15 percent, up to a maximum reduction of 75 percent over 50 years. Land values are calculated separately. Put simply, depreciation reduces property tax bills.
Enter Anderson’s proposal. It would reset depreciation after a house is sold. Consider that 10-year-old house. The current owner’s tax bill would reflect the 15 percent depreciation. But if the home were sold, the depreciation schedule for the new owners would reset to zero and then decrease by 1.5 percentage points per year.
The appeal of this proposal is that it’s a backhanded way to increase property tax collections by billions of dollars. Current homeowners wouldn’t pay more. New homeowners wouldn’t know the difference.
“We are not raising taxes,” Anderson said. “I want to make sure that’s clear. It is being looked at in a different way. It is being calculated in a different way.”
That’s an absurd claim. Property taxes would be calculated in a different way in order to raise revenue. And if Anderson’s proposal wasn’t about raising taxes, government entities and public employee unions wouldn’t have lined up in support of this proposal.
AJR1 “represents a critical step towards fully funding our public schools,” Dawn Etcheverry, president of the Nevada State Education Association, said. She wants an “additional $600 million” for schools this session.
That demand comes just two years after Gov. Joe Lombardo and legislators poured $2.6 billion into Nevada’s failing education system. In June 2023, I wrote, “Easiest prediction in Nevada politics. Within a few years, the education establishment will return, claiming to be underfunded and demanding ever more money.” And here we are.
This is an example of why you should ignore all the crocodile tears about underfunded government agencies. Dumping money into a broken system doesn’t fix it. It just makes it more expensive.
Consider the Public Employees’ Retirement System of Nevada. The current contribution rate is 50 percent for police and fire employees and 33.5 percent for other workers. This summer, those rates will jump to 58.75 percent and 36.75 percent, respectively. Local governments and employees split those contribution rate increases.
More tax revenue would indeed make it easier for local governments to absorb those higher costs. But that would just paper over the real problem. PERS is out of control and has been for decades. Local governments won’t push the issue if they believe they can just squeeze more out of taxpayers.
AJR1 is a constitutional amendment, which means voters would have to approve it if the Legislature passes it twice. Anderson said this would let the people weigh in on “how they feel.” If she really wanted to do that, she’d offer a second proposal to cut property taxes by 10 percent.
Give voters a real choice instead of trying to trick them into supporting a property tax increase.
Contact Victor Joecks at [email protected] or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on X.