Boone County commissioners approved a tax freeze on real property for citizens aged 62 and older at its meeting Thursday afternoon.
This will freeze eligible senior’s real estate taxes at the levels they are at in 2024. This tax relief is a revised version the Missouri General Assembly passed this session and still requires Gov. Mike Parson to sign it into law. The fact that county commissioners approved it before it was signed into law has some people upset.
“They made the wrong decision,” State Rep. Cheri Toalson Reisch, R-Hallsville, said. She was upset that the version the commission passed includes an exception where qualified applicants would not receive subsidies for taxes to pay back voter-approved public bond debt.
Toalson Reisch said her advisors sent her an email saying “Senate Bill 756 says counties can’t stop freezing property taxes because of bonded indebtedness.”
Senate Bill 756 is the modified version of the senior citizen real estate property tax bill the General Assembly passed this year. It was meant to clarify the version that passed last year. The most notable difference between the two is the new one clarifies eligible taxpayers as those 62 years of age or older.
Article IV section 27(b) of the Missouri Constitution allows local governments to sell public bonds but does not specify who is responsible for repaying the taxes for them.
Charles Cantrill helped collect signatures to put the issue on the April ballot. Boone County voters passed the measure to allow a freeze in that election.
He supported the commission’s decision to pass the current version of the tax freeze. The commission concluded that both the exception for public debt and an exception for payment for the state’s blind pension fund are constitutionally mandated.
“That just means that cities and counties in Missouri are taking care of their debt. They’re handling their debt. They’re not going upside-down on the debt, which pushes the problem off to increases in sales taxes or higher personal property taxes, or higher levies on anything,” Cantrill said. “If you don’t handle your debt, you can start being charged on going to the park, parking special places, all kinds of taxes that didn’t even exist today, just to satisfy the debt revenue.”
Other exceptions that are not constitutionally mandated are taxes on the value of new construction and if someone’s real estate is annexed into a different county.
If Parson signs the revised tax freeze bill, it won’t go into effect until August. Boone County commissioners said the deadline to apply for the tax freeze for 2025 will be Oct. 1 of this year. If they waited until August to pass a new version, seniors would have had less time to apply.
Cantrill said getting the most seniors to apply for the freeze is important.
“Literally, you can do everything right in America. You can pay off your mortgage. You can take care of your home. You can pay all your utilities and your debt and your revenue and still, you can lose your home,” Cantrill said. “Only for the simple fact that property taxes in some states are too high.”
Cantrill continued, “We don’t want a whole new wave of homeless elderly people here in Boone County or in the state of Missouri, so we need to take steps to give seniors, that have paid their dues and worked through the system a chance for a tax break.”
Toalson Reisch is gathering signatures to put an issue on the November ballot forcing the commission to re-draft the senior property tax freeze in Boone County. In a statement on Thursday, she said she has 4,000 signatures and needs 600 more.
Presiding Commissioner Kip Kendrick said Missouri is only the 12th county in the state to pass a senior citizen property tax freeze, and the first since the legislature passed the revised bill with further clarification.
Kendrick explained the commission passed their version of the tax freeze with the new bill in mind.
“This is a complex system,” Kendrick said. “I’m confident about Boone County government’s ability to implement this program and to do so effectively.”
Cantrill said he had to move from his house in Iowa for the simple fact that the property taxes there were too high.
“As long as Missouri takes steps so that people that retire don’t have to forgo their home, don’t have to become homeless, that is what I call progressive policy and progressive democracy,” he said. “That’s what we need. That’s what this legislation supports.”
The commission also passed a Chapter 100 bond agreement for Kraft Heinz’s Oscar Mayer hot dog plant in Columbia. The agreement will give Kraft Heinz a 75% abatement on property taxes for $49 million worth of new equipment it purchases to upgrade the facility, the Missourian reported.
