University Daily Kansan / Thursday, March 23, 1989
11
Protesters say classification, reappraisal are overly taxing
by Max Evans Kansan staff writer
Local residents who took part in a rally Tuesday at the state Capitol say reappraisal and classification could pay longer after paying long after the taxes are due.
The rally was conducted to protest proposed property tax increases.
Mike Edmondson, president of the Lawrence Board of Realtors, said he received a reappraisal notice yesterday on Stone Meadows Square, 600 Lawrence Ave. Although he owns the property, Edmondson said a property he would receive eventually would be passed on to the consumer.
"We'll have to pass the increase to the tenants; in turn they will pass it on to the customers," Edmondson said.
Edmondson said the 100 percent increase in valuation of his property was low compared with figures he had heard of as high as 500 percent.
Reappraisal was mandated by the Legislature in 1865; classification was an amendment, approved by the Senate in 1866, to the state constitution.
Edmondson and other Lawrence
business owners joined colleagues from across the state on Tuesday at the rally on the Capitol steps. The group, which called itself Kansans for Justice, has asked a spokespeo to legislators in House and Senate committee hearing rooms.
Mark Buhler, vice president of Stephens Real Estate & Insurance, 2701 West Sixth St., said that reapraisal had lowered taxes for some, such as farmers and certain merchants, the loss in taxes had to be recouped.
“In order to put back what had been taken away, you had to get it,” Buhl said of the increased size of small businesses and home owners.
But Jim Mayer, executive vice president of the Kansas Association of Realtors, said politics and strong lobbying efforts shifted taxation from one sector of business, which included utility companies, the oil and gas industry and the livestock another sector that could less aid it.
"They had the big guns with all the money," Mayer said.
Mayer said the group hoped to persuade legislators to place a moratorium on any property tax increases until 1991. The proposed constitutional amendment would allow time for all appeals to property-tax increases to be processed and the reappraisal's merit to be examined. He said that during the interim, taxes would be paid at the 1988 level.
If sanctioned by the Legislature, the proposed amendment would go to a public vote June 4, Mayer said. He said that without the moratorium, he thought Lawrence and the entire population would suffer a decline in growth.
"Eighty-eight percent of the businesses in Kansas are small businesses," Mayer said. "If we drive those people out of business, then people won't be able to buy houses. Those people are going to move 60 miles away to a state where they don't have to pay so much."
Mayer said that Kansas, which in recent years has had the second-highest failure rate of small business, is facing a business-closing crisis.
"Owners are going to let these businesses go back to the bank," Mayer said. "We're going to see a lot of foreclosures."
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