He Demsplained why my home was worth so much more and yadda yadda. I told him that I am NOT planning to move and just want to live in Boise and not ATM my house. I don’t believe I’m getting my tax monies’ worth if they won’t even teach the kiddies how all this money system exists in the first place.

Everything is overpriced because the system will print whatever money it wants to overvalue it. If trillions of dollars exist, you can bet that things will be priced for as much as a market can be talked into paying for it. If banks could not just print at will, then stupid sky high prices could not be paid for stuff that’s most likely 90% too high.

Now as for government efficiency, I might ask you the question how efficient is it to have a state agency act on behalf of a local district for any purpose (school funding, public safety, etc)? This lends itself to the same argument between state and federal powers, wherein states are going to be more efficient in many facets of managing the governmental business of the state. Moreover, local government is going to be more efficient than the state in handling governmental business at the local level. A good example of that is the frustration that local jurisdictions in the state of Idaho see that are not in the Boise area. They are often times ignored. When the school maintenance in operations was removed from Property Tax in 2006, funding for those operations were to be the responsibility of the state, with the exception of one school district; Boise. Because of its “Capital City” pull Boise School district was able to pull-off special treatment in this legislation, which also leads to disparate funding of other school districts, hence all of the supplemental bonding that is occurring for maintenance in operations in West Ada School district, among the many other districts throughout the state.

I also encourage all of those reading and posting here to contact your state and local representatives, your district state reps/senator and your county commissioners, about rising property tax assessments.

One of the sticking points for *everyone* is failing critical infrastructure and the decoupling of any increasing property tax paid to cover this critical infrastructure. Not right.

Now, money does not fix everything, nor does rampant spending on stupid projects like a trolley system for our fat mayor to ride around on his lunch hour. Or a sports stadium that neighbors and other valley residents do not want, and will be likely ignored like the many other sporting endeavors attempted to be brought to this valley (see Idaho Stampede, Boise Burn, etc, etc..).

Where taxing authorities ratchet up their budgets is with new construction growth, hence the 3% plus growth limitation placed on taxing authorities. Growth comes from new construction, changes in land use, and cessation of Urban Renewal districts, see (Central District UR ending 8/2017), which taxing authorities can levy those assessment dollars to increase their budgets. Now you might ask, doesn’t that just occur for one year? The answer is no. That increase in those budgets goes on and grows by that 3% plus growth “limitation.” My opinion should be that budgetary growth should not exceed the nominal rate of inflation and the “growth factor” should be limited to the percentage of growth experienced within that taxing district in a given year (by population, parcel count, or some other factor).

EDITOR NOTE–Also there should not be exemptions for businesses like SIMPLOT, PAYETTE BREWING, and SCENTSY. They and their employees all consume services and should not rely on the rest of us to provide services to them for free.

EDITOR NOTE–You are totally correct. The only problem is we DID pass a 1% limit and the all knowing legislature flipped the taxpayers the bird and recpealed what we had passed.