CONSERVATIVE FRIENDS: PLEASE READ BEFORE VOTING ON AMENDMENT B. tl;dr: this is a battle for control over of your property taxes, and the ability to continue socializing them for donors, and I believe powerful interests are getting in front of any effort to reform this broken system as was necessary in 20 other states who had similar issues before and where voters finally took action. I do not believe a good faith reading has anything to do with protecting you from outside groups wanting to raise taxes (the record below shows that). Further, even if a tax pass through initiative, the State Legislature retains the ability to immediately repeal it before it ever taxes anyone, meaning the benefits being sold are illusory. Instead, I believe lobbyists for developers and their preferred legislators are the progenitors of this initiative and behind this campaign inn a pre-emptive attempt from stopping their looting of our property taxes. Please vote NO, so we can right the wrongs the legislature has given us vis-à-vis socialized costs and private profits for their donors, and as is demonstrated below any property tax restructuring will almost certainly require a 60% vote per this Amendment. They know the political winds are turning hard on property taxes and this bill is designed to frustrate any citizen led effort on the topic. All the receipts are below, please read and share this post as time is short to beat back this bad faith Amendment. ---------- The claims: With that out of the way, let’s evaluate the claims as being presented by the legislature and its big money backers to voters. The first and most obvious is that, despite your lying eyes of being in the highest taxed red state, they’re desperate to protect you from higher taxes. And that groups like MWEG have ulterior motives to further increase the highest tax burden of any red state, and the threat was so severe that it necessitates a constitutional amendment in 2026. Let’s evaluate the evidence to assess how real this threat is in 2026: · “Out-of-state special interest money”(Rep. Blake Moore, Hesterman, AFP). Amendment B limits votes, not money. Utah has no contribution limits at all, and the legislature refuses to change this. And the YES side’s own organizations on Ballotpedia’s list are Americans for Prosperity–Utah and Americans for Tax Reform, both national groups · “You can’t vote out your neighbors.” You don’t need to; the Legislature rewrote all three 2018 initiatives by simple majority (Prop 2 in December 2018, Prop 3 in February 2019, Prop 4 in 2020). Voters have no such recourse against the Legislature’s tax votes. · “It protects taxpayers.” From voters, and in name only. The Legislature raises taxes on a simple majority with no public vote, and in 2018 it froze the school property tax levy, about $125 million a year in increases nobody voted on. Rep. Dailey-Provost’s offer to apply 60% to legislators went nowhere. And countervailing all this is the hysteria by its proponents about boogeyman left wing groups is that any tax increase, can be undone by a simple legislative majority, period. So, all this nonsense about your legislators being the only officials you can trust is not credible, and I’d characterize it in some cases as bad faith gaslighting in some cases, but in most cases it’s good people that have been co-opted by a deceptive narrative being spun by those with undisclosed agendas at work. And before someone addresses it in the comments, I want to point out that the 2024 Supreme Court ruling on initiatives does not at all cover taxation, so constitutionally, any tax some left-wing group pushed (as the sponsors tell us we need to protect against), could be repealed by a simple majority in the legislature. So if there exists no known initiative this is meant to counter (per the Sponsors’ own admissions), and also in reality does not even preclude the legislature from undoing a bad initiative voters were duped into voting for, then what exactly is going on here with this massive push with money from out-of-state lobbyists such as the AFP-Utah to desperately get us to take away our ability to influence our taxation? Hint, it has everything to do with the continued socialization of your property taxes for the benefit of developers. But before getting into the practical consequences of how devastating this 60% threshold will be against a potential reform movement, let’s talk about the track record of those in the legislature trying to protect us against these invisible tax boogeyman over the past 5 years. Nearly every single time a bill came up to curb the ability to raise taxes, give us a bill of rights, or otherwise protect us from developers who’ve figured out how to prime us for their private profits, the legislature has rejected it, and here are the receipts: 2022 HB478, Rep. Brad Last (R). Ended the school basic-levy freeze a year early and repealed the WPU value rate. Passed the House 56-13, died in Senate Rules. HB128, Rep. Mike Kohler (R). Repealed the 1995 school impact fee ban so districts could charge impact fees. Never assigned to a committee. 2023 HB260, Rep. Joel Briscoe (D). Raised the circuit breaker income cap to $50,000. Passed the House 68-0, pulled into Senate Rules; the Senate tax chair said he preferred deferral. HB454, Rep. Kera Birkeland (R). Senior cap: taxes could rise no more than 5% a year for homeowners 70+ under $50,000 income. Listed in committee, never considered. HB296, Rep. Walt Brooks (R) and SB 141, Sen. Wayne Harper (R). Cut the statewide school levy by $100M–$128M. Neither was ever assigned to a committee. SJR1, Sen. Dan McCay (R). Would have let the Legislature exempt more than 45% of home value. The committee stripped that language after Utah Taxpayers Association opposition; the remainder died in House Rules. HB298, Rep. Candice Pierucci (R). Full primary-residence exemption for 100%-disabled veterans. Died in House Rules. HB372, Rep. James Cobb (R). Let voters refer school-board tax increases to the ballot. On the agenda, never discussed. 2024 HB354, Rep. Tyler Clancy (R). Voter approval before any entity exceeds its certified rate through 2026. Never heard. HB173, Rep. Candice Pierucci (R). School-board tax referendum. Passed the House 42-28; the Senate committee listed it and skipped it. HB512, Rep. Walt Brooks (R). Cut the school levy by $75M. Never assigned to a committee. SB146, Sen. Keith Grover (R). Senior and disabled “work-off” credit against property tax. Never heard. 2025 SB224, Sen. Wayne Harper (R). Raised the circuit breaker limit to $46,000 and the top credit to $2,000. Never assigned to a committee. HJR7 and HB428, Rep. Jill Koford (R). Raise the primary residential exemption to 50%, with constitutional room to 55%. HJR 7 never left Rules; the 50% was stripped from HB 428 before passage. HB511, Rep. Tiara Auxier (R). Voter opinion question before revenue increases, plus a cap on retained new-growth revenue. Held in committee 9-0. HB 408, Rep. Rex Shipp (R). School-board referendum including tax increases. Passed the House 40-33, failed in Senate committee 3-4. 2026 SB97, Sen. Dan McCay (R). As filed, a 5% cap on Truth-in-Taxation increases; rewritten into fund-balance limits and a one-exemption-per-household rule. Died on the Senate floor 14-15. HJR 7 and HB 161, Rep. Jill Koford (R). Primary residential exemption to 60%. Assigned to committee, never heard; Koford cited business opposition. HB 484, Rep. Kay Christofferson (R). 5% cap on Truth-in-Taxation revenue growth unless voters approve more. Held in committee 7-3 after two hours of testimony. HB 485, Rep. Tiara Auxier (R). Cap on new-growth revenue. Never assigned to a committee. HB 449 and HJR 20, Rep. Tiara Auxier (R). A taxpayer bill of rights: voter approval for tax and debt increases, a spending cap with refunds, sales-comparison assessment. Never assigned to a committee. HB 365, Rep. Thomas Peterson (R). Entities must notice the amount and purpose of an increase before budgeting and cannot exceed it. Passed the House 67-2, pulled into Senate Rules on March 4. HB 170, Rep. Rex Shipp (R). School-board tax referendum, fourth year running. Passed the House 50-21, failed on the Senate floor 9-15. This is not a state legislature that is your friend when it comes to taxpayer protections (and most of us can see that with our wallets and eyes). As the record shows, nearly every single time a legislator pushes common sense protections for you the taxpayer, they reject it, and usually in a humiliating fashion like denying it an assignment to a committee or letting it die without a sponsor in the Senate. For example, Tiara Auxier’s 2026 HB485 reasonable cap on new revenue growth was never even assigned to a committee for debate, and a taxpayer bill of rights she also sponsored (HB449), modeled after the very popular (with actual voters in both parties) Colorado Taxpayer Bill of Rights was also never even assigned to a committee. In sum, nearly every single chance this legislature has had to curb the growth of property, protect the taxpayer from the continued socialization of their taxes for the benefit of developers like Mike Kohlers HB128 in 2022 almost never even make it out of rules and into a committee, and those that do get killed elsewhere. So the need that is so urgent to protect the taxpayer from themselves, as we’re being told by YES promoters, in my opinion is because they know they’ve boiled the frog on property taxes for too long. And this legislature through its own actions have created a true property tax crisis across the state by design, and they want to strip you of your ability to solve without them. Don’t trust me, don’t trust anyone, just look at the track records of those pushing it, and look at your own property tax bills as they’ve continued to push unfunded mandates and socialized benefits for developers like protecting them from impact fees as our middle-class and seniors get gouged each year. They do nothing, and even worse are desperate to prevent the frog they know is boiling on a potential citizen’s amendment on the issue from jumping out the pot to rescue us from their misdeeds that they have shown zero intention on ever fixing for us because it would finally force their developer donors to pay for their own burdens on the taxpayer. This property tax crisis we’re in within Utah, is not unique to this state, and those who’ve studied the issue know that only very rarely do legislatures fix it voluntarily (powerful lobbies figure out ways to benefit from property taxes and fight hard to prevent changes), and in the vast majority of cases where true reform happened it was necessary for citizens to do it themselves (more on that below). But before we get into what we’re ultimately sacrificing as citizens if B passes, we first need to understand the language in this bill and why it is so pernicious, here’s the actual text: "(iii) Notwithstanding Subsection (2)(a)(i)(A), initiated legislation that is subject to a vote that occurs after November 1, 2026, shall be adopted upon approval of at least 60% of those voting on the legislation if the initiated legislation includes: (A) the imposition of a new tax; (B) an expansion of an existing tax to include additional items or transactions subject to the tax; (C) an increase in an existing tax rate; or (D) for a property tax, a change to the tax rate that causes the tax rate to decrease less than it would under current law." While this language seems innocuous it’s not. Let’s just say for example that on average the property tax rate was 0.6% and voters instead wanted to fix it at say 0.55% of cost rather than market value to permanently take back control of reasonableness from the tax authorities, then it would require a 60% vote even though the law is decreasing property taxes and structurally protecting the taxpayer against the madness that has happened over the past decade in Utah where we’ve been effectively socializing developer costs. For example: values rise and the certified rate would fall from 0.6% to 0.5%. An initiative that holds the rate at 0.55%, or changes how new growth is counted so the math lands at 0.55%, “decreases less than it would under current law” and needs 60%, even though no one “raised” anything. This is the deception behind this language, which the sponsors are very aware of and hoping no one noticed how devastating this would be for any property tax reform effort by the citizens. I believe this specific language, and the necessity to kneecap our ability to change the structure of said property taxes is at the core of why this was pushed and why it was pushed now. And to give you that same insight, it’s necessary to evaluate the progenitor of the bill, Senator Lincoln Fillmore, and the money behind the push for YES in the AFP-Utah. Fillmore’s own admission that it “is not designed to stop any particular initiative,” and the sponsors’ “Highlighted Provisions” saying the target includes “the amount of revenue collected,” which is what makes clause (D) reach caps. Let’s evaluate who Lincoln Fillmore and the AFP-Utah are truly working for, not by my declaration or your assumptions, but by the record. In 2026 alone, this bill’s sponsor Lincoln Fillmore, sponsored two other bills that in my opinion would’ve put gasoline on the trash fire that is the ongoing property tax crisis, including: - SB245 (2026) – In committee, Mr. Fillmore moved to amend and advance a Musselman sponsored bill requiring cities to spend impact fees only on projects in the plan in place when the fees were collected. Homebuilders supported it, but fortunately for local taxpayer protections, it stalled on the Senate floor and died. - HB184 (2026) – Mr. Fillmore was the Senate Sponsor of this monstrosity which was also actively lobbied for by the money behind this initiative The AFP-Utah. This bill would’ve significantly weakened local zoning that had provisions to automatically developer plans if so much as a local body did not respond formally within 45 days to such application. Needless to say, this bill would’ve exacerbated the property tax crisis by removing local councils from even having a say if they foot faulted on a builder application. So to be clear, in 2026 alone Senator Fillmore pushed two bills, heavily lobbied for by the real industry, that would’ve been devastating to property taxpayers given the socialized nature of them in Utah (fortunately both were so bad that they died a quick death). But conveniently in this same session alongside his partner on HB184, the AFP-Utah, which is funding a good chunk of the money behind the YES on B effort, is pushing what I believe is a trojan horse amendment, that I show above does not offer the protections most voters think it does against out-of-state groups, and in reality solely kneecaps our own ability to take matters into our own hands vis-à-vis the growing property tax crisis in Utah. Property tax reform, by far, is the most likely use of a citizen-led effort in taxes in my opinion, and that’s what I believe they are protecting donors against. In fact to make it even more real, the group that testified for SJR 2 (this Amendment B) at both hearings is the group that got the homeowner-exemption increase stripped from SJR 1 in 2023, whose opposition Koford cited for her 2025 and 2026 bills, and that told the Senate committee it preferred deferral to the circuit breaker. Its former president is the YES PAC’s spokesman. That is a provable chain from the YES lobby to blocked homeowner relief. So to be clear, the actual money behind this, that wants to protect you has actually lobbied to strip protections for homeowners, and did so recently. So I’ll ask the voter, do you need protections from MWEG or rather from the actual proponents of YES per their own track record? So what are we sacrificing in a real sense, that other states with similar issues (of tension between voters and lobbyists over property taxes), is the ability to solve the property tax crisis with initiatives. That is the voters’ ability to end the socialization of property taxes and put reasonable caps that allow our seniors and young families to financially plan their futures around, something not offered and actively blocked by our legislature. Here are the States who were in similar spots to us with property tax crises that solved them (to the dismay of lobbyists who fought them every step of the way) in both red and blue states, and what B strips our ability as citizens to do ourselves: Citizen initiatives that passed: California, Prop 13 (1978). 1% rate cap, 2% assessment growth, reassessment only on sale, two-thirds for new taxes. The template. Idaho, Proposition 1 (1978). A Prop 13 copy passed with 58%; the Legislature rewrote it into budget-growth limits within two years. Michigan, Headlee Amendment (1978). Rolls millage rates back when assessments outrun inflation and requires voter approval for new local taxes. Massachusetts, Proposition 2½ (1980). Levy capped at 2.5% of value and 2.5% annual growth, overridable only by local vote. Still the backbone of Massachusetts local finance. Missouri, Hancock Amendment (1980). Revenue limit tied to personal income, levy rollbacks after reassessment, voter approval for local tax increases. Montana, I-105 (1986). Froze property tax levies at 1986 levels. Oregon, Measure 5 (1990) and Measure 47 (1996). Rate caps, then a rollback-and-3%-cap initiative that the Legislature replaced with Measure 50 (1997): a “maximum assessed value” that grows 3% a year regardless of market value. This is the closest match to historical-cost-plus-3% model. Florida, Save Our Homes (1992). Homestead assessments rise no more than 3% or CPI a year, whichever is lower. Colorado, TABOR (1992). Voter approval for any tax increase, revenue limits with refunds. Washington, I-747 (2001). Capped levy growth at 1% a year; the state supreme court struck it in 2007 and the Legislature re-enacted it in a special session within weeks. Legislature-referred amendments voters approved (noteworthy that this would still be at 50% in Utah, but because I believe only a threat of a voter amendment would get our legislature to back something similar as the record shows): Alabama, Amendment 373 (1978). Classification, assessment-ratio caps and mandatory votes on millage increases, passed in the Prop 13 panic. Arizona, Prop 106 (1980) and Prop 117 (2012). A 1% cap on residential taxes, then a 5% cap on annual valuation growth. Colorado, Gallagher (1982). Fixed the residential share of the tax base, which drove the residential assessment rate from 21% to about 7%; voters repealed it in 2020 (as “Amendment B,” oddly enough). Michigan, Proposal A (1994). Taxable value grows no faster than inflation or 5%, resets on sale; school operating taxes shifted to a higher sales tax. Oklahoma, SQ 676 (1996) and SQ 758 (2012). 5% cap on valuation growth, cut to 3% for homesteads and farmland. Texas (1997, 2023, 2025). 10% homestead appraisal cap, then a $100,000 homestead exemption with a 20% cap pilot for other property, then $140,000. Texas has no citizen initiative, so every one went through the Legislature. Arkansas, Amendment 79 (2000). 5% homestead and 10% other-property assessment caps plus a senior freeze. South Carolina (2006). Reassessment increases capped at 15% over five years, paired with swapping school operating taxes on homes for a sales tax. Florida, Amendment 1 (2008) and Amendment 5 (2024). Portability of the Save Our Homes cap and a 10% cap on non-homestead property, then an inflation-indexed homestead exemption. Indiana, Public Question 1 (2010). Wrote 1%, 2% and 3% caps on homes, other residential and business property into the constitution. Georgia, Amendment 1 (2024). Statewide homestead cap at inflation, with a local opt-out. Wyoming, Amendment A (2024). Created a separate residential class so homes can be assessed differently; the 2025 Legislature then cut owner-occupied assessments 25%. So in sum, I know this post was dense, but given how this information doesn’t seem to be anywhere, I thought it necessary to put it all out for the public to see and scrutinize. Powerful lobbyists know the property tax frog is reaching a boiling point and voters are near taking action as they have in so many other states previously and B effectively kills such efforts. It’s cynical, but with all the facts, in my opinion it’s the only logical conclusion given that the actual facts about protections against outside groups is just a smoke screen with no substance. Lastly, please don’t interpret anything I write here as indicting any of B’s YES supporters as bad faith or they are in on it. 99% of people rallying behind the YES campaign are good faith actors that believe the narrative that they need to protected against outside groups and have not at all looked at the motives behind, nor fully understand its implications. This also includes the majority of our legislators who voted yes in the house and senate and like all the other bills had near zero time to evaluate its repercussions, and they should not be blamed as being “in on it”. I know some of them of them personally and they themselves were presented it the same way we have received info. In my opinion, the biggest assist that YES has received is the fact that boogeyman groups the right uses to mobilize its base such as MWEG, and others have come out in the NO, which enables them to spin a left versus right narrative and distract from the actual facts that people who are good intentioned would have researched more thoroughly otherwise. I believe by tribalizing the issue, they’ve co-opted a lot of good people into buying the narrative that it’s us versus them, and them is the groups they want to defeat, letting their guard down against their “friends” who are funding the YES on B effort. I’m hoping this note converts some of those folks and we can say no to concentrating more power into the hands of the legislature when it comes to our ability to reform property taxes. But it will take an army to make this succeed and it’s why I’m asking for your help in sharing this. PLEASE SHARE WITH AS MANY AS POSSIBLE. YES IS UNFORNATELY AHEAD IN THE POLLS AND ONLY THROUGH A HERCULEAN GRASSROOTS EFFORT CAN WE SAVE OURSELVES FROM THIS LEGISLATIVE POWER GRAB, WHICH WILL MAKE NECESSARY PROPERTY TAX REFORM UNQUANTIFIABLY HARDER AND PERHAPS MAKE EVEN IMPOSSIBLE.