Amendment A blindsided me, as it did many Wyomingites. Before it blindsided voters, it blindsided the Senate. You should know that strange story.
Amendment A started out as HJ0002 Constitutional Amendment-Residential Property Class. It was sponsored by speaker Albert Sommers (R-Pinedale), co-sponsored by Reps. Crago, Harshman, and Northrup, and by Senator Pappas. In the opening weeks of the 2023 legislative session, it sailed through committee and passed its first two floor votes.
Then, on its third reading, it failed to garner the two-thirds majority vote needed for a constitutional amendment. It deservedly died and was buried in the graveyard of failed bills.
Meanwhile, Senator Dan Dockstader (R-Afton) had another idea. He sponsored SJ0003 Property tax exemption for the elderly and infirm. This bill would have amended the Wyoming Constitution, not by creating a new property class, but by allowing the legislature to “exempt from taxation…the elderly and infirm if necessary for the support of the poor.”
SJ0003 passed unanimously through committee. Then, it passed the full Senate unamended (21-10). By Feb. 23, it cleared the House Revenue Committee (5-4) and passed the first two readings on the floor of the House.
Then something strange happened. A massive amendment was proposed that stripped “exemption for the elderly and infirm” from its title. It completely gutted the bill. Then, it exhumed the dead and rotting HJ0002 and stuffed it into the hollowed-out skin of SJ0003.
In a weird combination of Frankenstein and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Sen. Dockstader’s constitutional amendment for the elderly and infirm was transmogrified into a zombie with an entirely different soul. This new bill was quickly passed by the House (53-9) and rubber-stamped by the Senate on a concurrence vote (22-8-1).
That’s how constitutional amendment A got on to the Nov. 5 ballot. The only thing that is the same between Dockstader’s exemption for the poor, and Sommers’ new property category is that both change Wyoming’s Constitution.
Cowboy wisdom is never to change the position of a gate unless you know why it is there in the first place. That wisdom is especially important when changing the Constitution, which is designed to fence in government.
Amendment A proposes to make a radical change to Article 15, Section 11, of the Wyoming Constitution. This is important because Section 11 is titled: “Uniformity of assessment required.”
Since statehood, the people of Wyoming have been keenly interested in preventing the legislature from assessing the properties of different citizens unequally. We are, after all, the equality state.
Just before Section 11, the Constitution creates a state Board of Equalization and assigns to it the duty of making sure that every Wyoming citizen is treated equally.
In 1890, Wyoming citizens decided that the best way to distribute the cost of government evenly was to assess “all lands and improvements thereon” (Art. 15, Sec. 1). That way, the larger the portion of Wyoming that a person owned, the larger the percentage of the tax burden he or she paid. Everything else was equal.
The only narrow exceptions to this rule are mining operations and industrial uses. All other property must be taxed equally, lest the state use its power of taxation to put a thumb on the scale of free enterprise.
It is illegitimate for powerful people to use the color of state law to favor one use of private property while disfavoring another use of the same private property.
If a person wanted to build a shack to live in or if a person wanted to build a hotel to live in, both citizens should be taxed equally. The difference in taxation would change only based on the amount of money invested in the property—not based on how the property was used.
Our founders were well aware that some would build rental housing, or large stores—like J.C. Penney in Kemmerer. A level playing field was more important than the government picking winners and losers.
Now, Amendment A wants to obliterate that equality. By creating a new class of “residential real property for owner-occupied primary residences,” the Constitution would allow for the legislature to punish some and reward others.
But by punishing “landlords,” “big-box stores,” or any villain du jour, it is not the owner who bears the burden, but the person buying groceries or paying the rent.
The Constitution—as written—keeps the tax on living quarters equal between renters and homeowners. Amendment A would drive a wedge between the two and open the gate to inequalities that our founders were too smart to allow.
Amendment A was buried once, It still belongs in the boneyard. Not in the Constitution of a free state.
Jonathan Lange is a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod pastor in Evanston and Kemmerer and serves the Wyoming Pastors Network. Follow his blog at https://jonathanlange.substack.com/. Email: JLange64@protonmail.com.
