‘Tyranny of the minority’: Bill gives 10% of voters power to knock down property tax increases

Rep. Adam Smith, shown here on March 26, 2026, worked on the tax conference committee to find a compromise property tax bill the House and Senate would pass. The House shied away from moving forward on the last day of the session with a constitutional amendment. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

By Morgan Chilson

Kansas Reflector

TOPEKA — The Senate and House narrowly passed a bill giving 10% of registered voters in a taxing area the ability to stop some property tax increases, a move one senator called “tyranny of the minority.”

Both chambers debated House Bill 2745 Friday. It passed the Senate 22-18 and the House 63-59. It now advances to Gov. Laura Kelly. 

Another proposal attempting to change the Kansas Constitution to limit property tax increases was shot down by the House but referred to a conference committee for more discussion. Senate Concurrent Resolution 1603, which needed support from two-thirds of both chambers, failed in the House 63-59.

The resolution, which would have been on the August ballot for voters to decide, limits the assessed valuation of residential, commercial, and agricultural  property from jumping more than 9% in any one year. 

What passed

HB 2745 was rewritten on the last day of the session by the Senate Committee on Assessment and Taxation and then passed by the Senate that same day. The speed made changes not only difficult to follow but difficult to get behind, said Rep. Tom Sawyer, a Wichita Democrat. 

The bill changed from its first introduction, which passed the House 76-45 on Feb. 26. 

“The changes the Senate made, I can’t support this any longer,” Sawyer said. “I think it’s too harsh on cities. We have growing areas. To not allow new construction, that’s very, very difficult for cities that are growing like my county.”

Under the bill, if any taxing entity, such as a city or county, plans a tax increase higher than the Consumer Price Index averaged from the previous year, or an increase in excess of 3%, then voters can circulate a petition to stop property taxes from going up. 

Once 10% of registered voters in the affected taxing district sign the petition, the taxing entity can’t raise taxes and can only pass a revenue neutral budget, meaning it can’t exceed the previous year’s spending level. 

Sen. Bill Clifford, a Garden City Republican, said the bill would affect growing cities, which may need to invest in large utility projects or other services, and could see “millions of dollars impeded by this approach.”

“What I see happening is a very activist, vocal minority will get this petition every single time, on the school, on the community college, on the county, on the city,” he said. “Whether it’s good policy or not, they will act to get a petition against whatever budget comes out and then stop it.”

Clifford said the bill would then push the taxing entity back to last year’s revenue, which doesn’t even allow for consumer price index growth. Sometimes, he said, insurance may go up 10% and benefit packages for emergency personnel increase.

“We are not allowing those entities to be able to have the flexibility of knowing their local situation way better than we do here at Topeka in order to make those adjustments,” Clifford said. “I really see this as an opportunity for tyranny of the minority.”

Others raised concerns about how taxing entities will get their budgets done earlier than current deadlines because they have to notify the public when they are going to exceed last year’s revenue.

Lansing Republican Sen. Jeff Klemp said guardrails can be helpful and taxing entities can still make their case through public education when a tax increase is necessary.

“Can they raise the mill rates to whatever they want? They have to sell that,” he said. “When we have that conversation around the tyranny of a minority, I don’t think those words are inaccurate. But it’s not as imbalanced as what it seems.”

What failed

Senate and House conference committee members trying to reach agreement on the constitutional amendment in SCR 1603 couldn’t find the magic answer that would appease both chambers.

The proposal started the session capping property assessment values at 3% increases per year. Then it went back and forth between a rolling average and capping increases. The resolution presented Friday to the House contained a 9% cap, eliminating the rolling average that Rep. Adam Smith, R-Weskan, told the conference committee was favored by the House. 

House Speaker Dan Hawkins, R-Wichita, offered a conciliatory message before the House voted on the bill. 

“This has been a tough week in a lot of ways. We started out this week with a big meeting, the majority leaders, speaker and Senate president and tax chairs on both sides,” he said. “We thought we knew where this week was going to go. It didn’t work out that way very well.”

Hawkins said complaints about negotiations were wrong.

“A lot of things have been said … that the House doesn’t negotiate in good faith,” he said. “That is absolutely not true. Our conference committee, our tax people, have negotiated in great faith.”

The difficulty in reaching agreement among 165 people — 125 in the House and 40 in the Senate — doesn’t minimize the importance of the issue, Hawkins said. 

“There isn’t a single one of us that doesn’t hear it day in and day out,” he said. “It is the one item that I get every day in emails from my district, and I get it across the state. You’ll see on my social media, them tearing us up, tearing me up because we haven’t gotten tax relief.”

Sawyer, the Wichita Democrat, said he was voting against the resolution because it was a tax shift, not a tax cut.

“It’s like getting a 15% off coupon but then you go to the store to use it, and all the prices went up 15% — because when you put a cap on the values, all the mill levies go up,” he said. 

A mill is equal to $1 for every $1,000 of assessed property value. For example, if a house has an assessed value of $11,500, the homeowner would pay $11.50 in property tax per mill levied by the taxing entity. Local governments determine the budget bottom line and then set the mill levy rate to receive the needed funding. 

Sawyer also raised the inequities that happen over time under a tax cap. As some properties are under the cap, newer properties aren’t under the cap or have been for lesser amounts of time. 

“States like Florida that had this cap a long time are having really big problems right now,” he said. “The National Tax Foundation gave lots of examples of properties that are next to each other, that have similar houses, similar market value, and one is paying 30 times as much property taxes as their neighbor because of the differences. You put these artificial caps on, it causes big problems with the real estate markets.”

Instead of letting the resolution die, the House voted to send it back to conference committee so more work could be done to reach agreement. The Legislature is scheduled to return April 9-10 to consider any vetoes by the governor, and could pass new bills during those two days.

This article was republished with permission from the Kansas Reflector. The Kansas Reflector is a non-profit online news organization serving Kansas. For more information on the organization, go to its website at www.kansasreflector.com.