BY ANNA KAMINSKI
Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — The Kansas House advanced property tax relief legislation Thursday, but its components must clear several more hurdles, including passage in the Senate, a vote of the people and another round of lawmaking, before its effects are realized.
Even if Senate Concurrent Resolution 1603 survives each of those steps, at least one piece of the proposal isn’t guaranteed.
The resolution seeks to ask voters in November if they want to permit the Legislature to freeze or limit property taxes for “qualifying seniors” and modify the constitution to base residential and commercial property valuations on the lesser of two values — current fair market value or an average fair market value over an unspecified amount of time.
Rep. Blake Carpenter, a Derby Republican who promoted the proposal Wednesday and Thursday, laid out his ideal process. If voters approve the constitutional amendment, a future Legislature would dissect, debate and pass legislation to make the policy a reality.
That process could address concerns like one from Rep. Dawn Wolf, a Bennington Republican. She worried the policy could produce uneven effects in urban and rural areas, where property values and age demographics differ widely.
“We have to be very careful when we do this,” she said during a Wednesday tax committee meeting, where the proposal initially was presented.
Implementing the legislation, depending on how it is written, could result in small, rural towns losing half or more of their property tax base, Wolf said.
Carpenter first proposed the property tax limits for seniors as an addition to the resolution during the Wednesday committee meeting and introduced it Thursday on the House floor, where the amended resolution passed in an 85-39 vote. However, even if the Senate and voters were to approve the limits, there is nothing embedded in the legislation that mandates the Legislature actually create the tax breaks for seniors.
The resolution’s change to how properties are valued, on the other hand, could create tangible change for homeowners and business owners across the state.
“Having the phrase ‘fair market value’ in our constitution is a great addition,” said Rep. Pat Proctor, a Leavenworth Republican who has repeatedly advocated for property tax relief this session for his district, which he said has seen some of the highest property tax increases in Kansas.
Some Democrats struggled with the seniors proposal’s lack of clear definition, especially for the term “qualifying senior.”
At one point during debate on the House floor Thursday, Carpenter pulled a Black’s Law Dictionary from inside the House floor lectern, referred to its entry on “seniors,” and read the second definition.
“‘Older than someone else’ is what’s defined as a senior,” he said, and offered to read from a stack of other dictionaries.
He told the House Tax Committee on Wednesday the constitutional amendment is intentionally vague. The Legislature could later define age, income levels or property value as conditions of the term “qualifying senior.” Under the proposal, the Legislature also could establish a time period to determine how to calculate properties’ average fair market value.
Rep. Stephanie Sawyer Clayton, an Overland Park Democrat, criticized Carpenter’s senior limit addition. Without clear definitions, she said, the proposed amendment could be misleading to voters.
“I am not going to support something that is essentially lying to people in my district, making them think that they could get this type of property tax relief when, in fact, legislatures might not give this type of tax break to the people in my district,” she said.
The property valuation proposal received overwhelming support in the House in 2025 when it passed in a 117-4 vote under a different resolution number.
Some of that support didn’t translate to Thursday’s vote. Carpenter’s changes to SCR 1603 passed the House with a two-thirds majority, as required by law. The Senate did not accept the bill as is, and it established on Thursday a committee to negotiate the provisions of the bill.
House Democrats largely opposed SCR 1603. Rep. John Carmichael, a Wichita Democrat, said the proposal “makes for good postcard fodder,” alluding to the upcoming election, during which all House members’ seats will be up for grabs.
Rep. Tom Sawyer, a Wichita Democrat, feared establishing senior limits would be a “big mistake.” He said it creates problems similar to those he saw within Senate Concurrent Resolution 1616, a taxable assessed value cap that the House voted down last week. Both, he said, shift the property tax burden onto other groups, especially younger people.
“I think helping seniors is a great idea,” Sawyer said. “I think that’s a lot of where our focus should be with property taxes, but this is not the way to do it because of the inequities it causes in our property tax appraisal system.”