Letter: Representation affects property taxes
If you are being squeezed by your property taxes and you look at the proportion that goes to your public school, you may be inclined to focus your ire there. Look wider. Our state has a constitutional mandate, which has been reaffirmed three times by three supreme court rulings, over multiple decades, to adequately fund public education. The response from the majority of our elected representatives has been threefold: deny, distract, delay. And their pending move is to slash state taxes that should be used to fund our schools. Our state’s contribution to public education is the lowest of all 50 states and dropping. The main reason your property taxes are high is because your state representatives are raising them by slashing business taxes and not obeying our constitutional mandate to adequately fund public education. Your property taxes and our state’s revenue are directly connected to each other like the two sides of a teeter-totter. If our state representatives obeyed our state laws, then your property taxes would decrease; when they slash state revenues they go up. Your vote matters. Use it wisely. Elect people who will represent you.