California's property tax burden has gradually shifted to homeowners because commercial and industrial property doesn't change hands as often as homes and the sales can be easily disguised.

A sale is a pretty straightforward transaction for a home. That's not the case for commercial or industrial property, where a sale can be disguised in an almost infinite number of ways.

"The whole system is completely unenforceable," says Lenny Goldberg, a Sacramento lobbyist who, as director of the California Tax Reform Assn., has been pressing for years to institute a "split roll" -- that is, to tax commercial and industrial property differently from residential.  The idea is to reverse what has been a shift in California's property tax burden onto homeowners from business owners under Proposition 13.

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Goldberg calculates that Disneyland, which hasn't had a reportable change of ownership since, well, forever, is currently taxed at an average of about a nickel per square foot. For comparison, a median California home bought last year out of foreclosure, measuring 1,600 square feet and selling for about $330,000 (these are averages from the California Assn. of Realtors), would incur property tax of about $3,300 per year, or $2.06 per square foot.

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An effort by public employee unions to get a split-roll initiative on the ballot in 2006 didn't even make it past the signature-gathering stage. But those were different times. Maybe, just maybe, the voters of this financially spavined state aren't still so reluctant to close a big loophole.

Ya think?


As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."