Senate Bill 311 directly addresses an AOC goal of facilitating communities’ preparations for catastrophic events.
The bill would authorize a city or county to adopt an ordinance or resolution providing a property tax exemption to commercial, industrial, and multifamily buildings that have been seismically retrofitted. At its hearing before the Senate Finance & Revenue Committee on March 21, friendly amendments were presented that strengthened reasonable limits on the local resolution or ordinance. The amendments define costs eligible for the exemption as costs directly related to the work necessary to seismically retrofit eligible property and incurred after an application relating to retrofit has been approved. They specify costs not to be included as eligible costs and limit eligible property to improvements built before January 1, 1993. SB 311-1 would allow property granted any other exemption or special assessment to qualify for the new retrofit exemption, and specifies the exemption time period of 15 years. The bill would strengthen authority of the city or county to further restrict eligible property by property type, impose an annual cap on total dollar value of exemptions and impose any other non-conflicting conditions. It would require proposed seismic retrofitting to meet specified performance standards and reporting of other government retrofitting incentives received. The amount of eligible costs would be reduced by the amount of other government incentives received.
The bill has a very high standard for agreement among local taxing districts by requiring taxing districts located within the territory of the local government whose governing bodies agree to the exemption, when combined with the rate of the local government adopting the exemption, to equal 75 percent or more of the total combined rate of taxation within the territory of the local government. For further protection, the bill authorizes the county assessor to charge the owner of the building a fee of up to $200 for first year and up to $100 for each subsequent year for which property exemption or partial exemption is granted, and provides for clawback of property taxes upon disqualification for failure to comply with eligibility requirements or make reasonable progress on seismic retrofitting or for misleading or false statements in the application.
AOC offered supporting testimony for the bill and the friendly amendments. The committee has not yet scheduled a work session, but all signs are positive for passage.
Contributed by: Gil Riddell | AOC Policy Director