Republican legislators will propose radical changes in Iowa’s property tax system. House Republican Leader Christopher Rants of Sioux City says G-O-P legislative candidates will lay the details out this fall. Rants says Iowa’s property tax system is antiquated and so “cobbled together with baling wire” that incremental change won’t work. He says the system must be scrapped, and lawmakers have to start over, from scratch.Rants says their first decision should be what property owners’ taxes should pay for, as today property taxes finance everything from county hospitals to community colleges to libraries. Rants believes property taxes should only finance cities, counties and schools. And he says the way property is valued should also be changed. Rants says it’s a little dangerous to say it’s time to scrap the property tax code, but he says that’s the only way to make the kind of changes that are necessary.
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