[All-Gorge] 🍽️ Splitting the Dinner Check - a Property Tax Explainer

Every spring, reassessment notices land in mailboxes across Skamania and Klickitat, and every spring they get misread as a bill. This episode explains what your assessment actually is: your share of a fixed check, capped by Washington's one percent levy limit, the same in both counties. We use real Home Valley numbers to show why your bill can climb while the county still runs short, and why the two facts do not cancel out.

In this episode

• The dinner-check idea: why your assessed value is a seat at the table, not a bill
• What a $100,000 reassessment really does to your bill, and to the county's budget
• The one part that surprises everyone: your bigger share is your neighbors' smaller share
• The 1% cap versus the roughly 5% real cost of running a county (Skamania and Klickitat both)
• The December decision each Board of Commissioners makes (Skamania skipped it once; Klickitat took it every year)
• The two ways a county's bill can actually grow, and why one wears everyone out
• Why this is on ballots across the country this November

Resources & Links

• Read the full written explainer at skamaniadispatch.com
• Skamania and Klickitat County Assessor certified levy sheets (public record)
• Washington Department of Revenue: how the 1% property tax levy limit works
• Washington State Auditor filings (county operating costs)

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome back to a very special all-gorge episode of Open Gorge Podcast. It's both our 50th episode and also my birthday. So I decided to treat all of us to dinner. Well, an imaginary dinner, where we all can learn a little bit more about the very real and often lesser-known math behind your property taxes. It's my gift to all of us ahead of what is sure to be a very busy election season. So let's get started. Every spring, the reassessment notices go out, and every spring, one of them stops somebody cold at the mailbox. You find out that the county now values your place at, say, $118,000 more than last year. It reads like a bill and it feels like a bill. But here's the thing that surprises almost everybody. Your assessment is not your tax. Today, what it actually is. By the end of this episode, you're going to read your own tax bill and know what it's not telling you. So picture this. Once a year, the whole county goes out to dinner together. Same restaurant, and mostly everybody orders what they ordered last year. One neighbor gets the chili, another gets the lamb chops, another gets the roast chicken plate. At the end, there's one big check for the whole table. That check is the county budget. The sheriff, the roads, the courthouse, the jail. Everyone chips in and your share of the bill is set by the size of your plate, which is the assessed value of your home. Bigger plate, bigger share. That's the whole idea behind property tax. Now here's the rule that changes everything. By law in Washington state, that check can only grow 1% a year. 1% no matter how much the county grows, no matter how much the dinner costs. The total can climb just 1% from last year. And that is the law in every Washington County, Schamania and Clickatat alike. So what happens when your property assessment jumps? What does that mean? Your plate got bigger. Maybe you added a baked potato with all the fix-ins. Or maybe you changed nothing at all, and good steaks just cost what they cost now, so your same plate is worth more this year. Either way, here's the rule of the slightly weird restaurant that we're all going to every year. A bigger plate does not add a dollar value to the total check. It just means you agreed to cover a bigger slice of the same check, while the neighbors whose plates went up less will cover a little bit less. So I know that sounds very confusing, so let's just try to maybe make a different example. How about we picture a tiny county with just 10 homes splitting a $50,000 check? Now three of those homes suddenly get reassessed higher. The check does not grow. The county still collects only $50,000, but those three slices that their assessment was higher, they swell, and the other seven slices shrink to make room. The three who were reassessed pay about $1,900 more between them, and the other seven pay exactly $1,900 less. Two of them didn't change at all, and they still paid less. So the same size pot just got re-sliced based on everybody's home values. Now there's one thing that does genuinely make the check bigger, and that's when somebody builds a brand new house, or a brand new building of any kind, new property to be taxed. If, say, at our dinner, a genuinely new diner pulls up a chair and pays for their own meal, in our tiny county, that 11th house or that new diner means that the county collects $55,000 instead of $50. And not one of the original 10 pays a penny more or less. The rate doesn't even move. New construction is the only thing that sets a truly new plate at our dinner table. So let's try to do it again with real numbers. And I like trying to take bites out of this, pardon the dinner pun, a couple of ways because I think listening to somebody just talk numbers at you through a podcast can be a little bit difficult. So let's try and pick another example. Let's use a home valley home here in Scamania County. A click-a-tat home would work the same way, just with different district names. So just bear with me. Let's say it's assessed at $400,000, then reassessed to $500,000. So that's a $100,000 increase in its assessment. Its bill is going to go from $3,400 to about $4,300. That's about $860 more spread across 16 taxing districts. We won't get into all of them. Now here's the surprise. How much does each district collect because of your $100,000 reassessment and all the new money you will be paying in property taxes? Zero. Every single one. The county budget does not move. The fire district doesn't get a penny more of that. The school does not move. Even the state school levy doesn't move. Your $860 did not appear out of nowhere and it did not vanish. It just moved around the table. Each district's rate ticks down by just a hair, just enough to keep its total right where state law froze it. Your bigger share is covered almost penny for penny by somebody else's slightly smaller one. Which raises, in my opinion, a fair question. If your bill is climbing, then it feels like the county must be doing fine, right? And this is the part that your tax bill can't show you. The check can grow 1% a year, by law, but running the county cannot. A sheriff's office, road crew, jails, courthouses, those cost about 5% more every year. I mean, we've all seen the impact of inflation and the other costs in our own household. Not 1%, 4% to 5% or more. And that's not just a Schamania problem or a click-itat problem. Across all 39 Washington counties, costs climb around 5% a year. Schamania's own runs north of 6 and click-atat's around 4.5%. Both blow past that 1% levy cap that's imposed on us from Washington state. So a check that grows 1% and costs that grow five, they open up like a pair of scissors, a little wider every single year. That gap is the county's real financial problem and it has almost nothing to do with your personal property home assessment. You can watch a county feel it every December when the commissioners decide whether to even take the 1% levy that the law allows. In Scamania, they skipped it one year and took it the next. Up in Clickitat, they took it three years running. Different calls, but the same tiny lever. Because look at the scale. That 1% is worth about $27,000. A 5% rise in operating cost is about three-quarters of a million dollars. The biggest move that your county government is allowed to make is just an itty bitty fraction of the bill they have to cover. There's no amount of clever budgeting that can really get around that problem. So your property tax bill going up and the county running short, they're both true at the same time, and neither one is causing the other. So here's the quiet damage. Because the check is fixed, your tax bill becomes a flight over the split. If my share went up, that means somebody else's went down. So we take it to the assessor and the appeals board, but redividing the dinner check never made it bigger and it never closes the gap. The cap turns a public question, what should our services cost, into a private grievance, whose share is about how it feels unfair to each of us. So how does that dinner check ever actually grow big enough? Well, two ways. One, as we said, a new diner sits down, new construction, new house, new business building, and that happens on its own. Nobody votes. Two, everybody at the table could agree to something called a levy lift lid, which is basically if everybody at that dinner table agreed to pay a bigger check by passing a levy or a bond. But we can even see from our own experience these last few months what that takes. The districts have to come back and ask election after election, and each time it only buys a little more because the starting point was held so low for so long. It's a lot of asking, and everybody gets really tired of being asked. And it seems like every time we ask, we get a meal that's only slightly better. It wears people out, and that fatigue is not an accident. It's what a tight cap produces. It feels like when you have to pay extra for guacamole on the side. And one more honest note, even a large new project is actually only a one-time bump, not a permanent fix. A large construction project lifts this year's check, but not how fast the check can grow. We can never break that 1% lid from the state. So the gap once again reopens in a couple of years, and the county needs the next one. Now is 1% the right number for the entire state of Washington? That's a choice, not a law of nature. Voters passed it in 2001. The state Supreme Court threw it out in 2007, but the legislature put it right back within the leaks. It never rules on whether 1% is the right figure for everyone. And the question has just never gone back to the voters, and it's live right now. Thirty-six states have changed their county tax limits since just 2019. This November, the same day you vote, North Carolina, for example, will decide whether to write a tax limit into its constitution. Now there's one more piece, and it's big enough for its own episodes, so we're just going to set you up here, perhaps give you a preview of our next meal we might share together. Out here, the county sits at a table where very few new chairs can ever be added. A lot of that land's already spoken for by federal ownership and by the national scenic area that runs through both counties, by the terrain and the market that it creates. What that does and how many chairs are forced to sit permanently empty is where we're going to head next time. For now, let's hold on to the simplest takeaway today. If your property tax bill keeps creeping up, but you cannot point to what it bought, no smoother road, no newer school, no bigger hospital, no more certainty, especially in fire season for the kinds of services we can all depend on, and the place itself just looks a little more worn every year, that's not a mystery. And here's what I want you to really take away. Nobody is pocketing the difference. It is the check. The check was never allowed to grow past inflation, while the price of everything it buys, everything you buy, everything I buy, everything the county buys, keeps climbing. The bill on your plate went up, and the meal it pays for did not. None of this episode is telling you how to vote. It just tells you what the numbers mean. I really do mean it when I say that I believe that informed communities are stronger communities. So next spring, when that notice lands in your mailbox, there are two questions. Ask yourself, first, did my slice grow because my place appreciated faster than my neighbors? And second, can the county actually pay for what it does? 1% on that levy lid versus maybe the 4 or 5% that their costs went up. Your tax bill answers the first question, but it cannot answer the second question. But now you know that it is your right to ask that second question anyway. One quick note on the numbers. All of those numbers that are discussed in today's episode come from the county certified levy sheets and the State Department of Revenue and State Auditor filings, all checked against the public record with our own in-house research tools. Sources are in the show notes. I want to thank you so much for joining us today. I know that this is a very unique episode about a very complex topic and one that's often very emotional, but I have to tell you how grateful I am that I get to sit at this table every single year and every single day with all of you as my neighbors. Thank you so much. You've been listening to a production of opengorge.org, the home of the Scamania Dispatch and the Click a Taddler. We believe that informed communities are stronger communities. To support our work and stay up to date on everything happening in the gorge, head over to schemania dispatch.com to sign up for our newsletters. You can also find us on Facebook at facebook.comslash open gorge. Join the conversation and share your thoughts on today's episode. Thanks for tuning in. Bone appetite, and we'll talk to you next time.