Wyomingites are dealing with rising home values, and those higher values are making property taxes increase too. These are hardworking people — from the barista making your coffee to the welder at the metal shop — just trying to make ends meet. Amendment A, which is on the November ballot, can help hardworking Wyomingites.
Opinion
Our Wyoming Legislature wants to help. We’ve already passed several laws to offer relief, like the property tax refund program, which helped over 9,000 families last year and will assist even more this year. We also passed a long-term homeowner exemption to make sure people who’ve spent their lives making Wyoming great don’t get pushed out of their homes because of high taxes.
But there’s a sticking point in our state constitution that makes it hard to give real, lasting tax relief to regular people. Right now, Wyoming requires that commercial and residential properties be taxed at the same rate. So if we lower taxes for homeowners, we have to lower them for big businesses too — like Walmart, the data centers in Cheyenne and the wind farms across the state. For some of these businesses, property tax is the only major tax they pay. That is part of why Wyoming is already ranked the No. 1 state for business taxes by the Tax Foundation almost every year.
Amendment A would fix this. It would allow us to treat residential property differently from commercial property. Even more importantly, it lets us separate owner-occupied homes from second homes. Right now, people can buy homes here as “primary residences” that they do not actually live in just to get a tax break, which drives up prices and taxes for everyone. Our tax relief should be focused on the people who live and work in Wyoming, not out-of-state buyers who just use our state for a tax break.
We know property taxes are important for funding local services like county government, schools and hospitals. But Wyomingites shouldn’t be afraid of losing their homes because of high taxes. Amendment A would help us balance both — keeping services funded while allowing the Legislature to give real relief to people who need it.
If you believe Wyomingites should be able to stay in their homes and still support important local services and their community, vote for Amendment A.
Why don’t you just stop the record spending? There are billions in state coffers. Government is not “starving”. Not now, not ever.
Why don’t each state dept/agency have to cut budget accordingly. There room to do so.
Mike argues that corporations like Walmart shouldn’t benefit from a reduction in property taxes. But if we treat them unfairly, will they set up shop here at all? The facilities built near Cheyenne by Walmart, Microsoft, Lowe’s, and now Meta exist largely because taxes are lower here than in Colorado… even though there are far more customers there than here.
Also, these businesses don’t just pay huge amounts of real property tax (a big box is worth more than thousands of houses); they also pay large amounts of another major tax: business personal property tax. We don’t want to drive that lucrative source of revenue away. And should we discriminate against Wyoming’s small, entrepreneurial businesses… especially when we need to develop them due to the collapse of extraction industries?
Finally, higher taxes on businesses come back to us as higher prices on goods and services. Eliminating tax breaks for businesses could ultimately raise the cost of living for everyone!
Yes, we want to help folks stay in their homes. But we can do this in ways that don’t involve discriminatory taxation of real estate, impacting our workforce, or hobbling business development.
It would have been wise for Mr. Yin to have explained how lowering my resident-owned property tax would in fact allow for local services to be adequately supported. I appreciate the intention behind helping home owners to stay in their homes; I just don’t get how the second half of the proposition works. Help me out here.