Agenda - Council - 12/20/1983 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

I I I I I I I I I I I i I I I I I Similarly, in McCannel, the limited market value law was upheld because it was intended to protect taxpayers from drastic and sudden increases in their property tax burden resulting from runaway inflation, despite the fact that as a result properties of equal actual market value could be taxed at significantly different levels .29/ The maximum and minimum aid restrictions in the local government aid formula unquestionably result in actual allocation of aid that does not directly reflect the measurements of cities' fiscal capacity and fiscal need represented by their preliminary aid figures. Nevertheless, like the deviations in Huntsville and McCannel,~ the disparity here is the result of the reasonable and rational efforts of the legislature to avoid drastic and sudden shifts in the amount of aid received by cities and the concomitant fluctuations in the property tax burden borne by the local taxpayers. As in McCannel and Huntsville, plaintiffs' equal protection challenge must, therefore, be rejected. See also Baker v. Strode, 348 F. Supp. 1257 (W.D.Ky. 1971) (state "rollback law" limiting annual increase in local school budget to 10 percent in the absence of a community-wide referendum upheld against constitutional attack because it served a legitimate purpose of protecting taxpayers against sudden substantial increases in their tax burdens); Northwestern School District v. Pittenger, 397 F. Supp. 975 (W.D.Pa. 1975) (statute granting "modified sparsity payments" to one class of school districts that had previously received sparsity payments based on previous census data, while denying sparsity payments to .similarly populated school districts t~at had not previously received sparsity payments, upheld against equal protection challenge on grounds that purpose was to avoid sudden, drastic elimination of funding on which the first class of school districts had become dependent). -31-