Shortfall: How an obscure amendment to the state’s property tax code helps corporations
Sometime in 2007, David Swinford, then a Republican state representative from the Panhandle town of Dumas, decided he’d had enough.
For five years running, the largest taxpayer in his district, Valero Energy Corp., had refused to pay all the property tax due on its McKee Refinery, which it acquired from Diamond Shamrock in 2003. Each year Valero sued the Moore County Appraisal District, claiming that the refinery’s appraised value—close to $300 million by 2007—was too high. As court proceedings dragged on, the company paid taxes to the Dumas school district, hospital district, county and other local entities based on the undisputed portion of its valuation—about half what Valero owed.
Now the unpaid bills added up to $11 million, and the school board had raised taxes to cover the school district’s portion of the shortfall. “The reality was, {Valero was} paying partial payment, the next year they would file again and it just kept running,” said Swinford, who chaired the House State Affairs Committee at the time. “At some point it’s got to end and settle up.”
At the time, Valero had filed hundreds of similar lawsuits all across Texas, seeking to lower the taxable value of billions of dollars’ worth of property—from pipelines to convenience stores to huge refineries. The potential loss of tax money would be felt by public schools, hospitals, community colleges and local governments in the refinery belt of Southeast Texas, where student enrollment is heavily minority and economically disadvantaged. And it would be felt in little Moore County, population 22,000, a featureless rectangle on the High Plains that was once nearly wiped out by a grasshopper plague.
Read more: http://www.texasobserver.org/property-taxes-texas-corporations-citizen-stretched-thin/
[font color=green]A long but excellent article providing details and citing examples about how corporations are able to use legislation for paying their fair share of property taxes in Texas.[/font]
