photo by: Ashley Golledge

Jamie Shew has served as the Douglas County Clerk since 2004. He is currently in his fourth term of office. He is pictured outside the Douglas County Courthouse on Thursday, Oct. 15, 2020.

If it becomes law, a bill that lets voters block local governments’ property tax increases will probably do a lot of other things behind the scenes, too. And Douglas County Clerk Jamie Shew is trying to figure out what.

It could throw a wrench into cities’ and counties’ planning. It could let a few dozen people in a rural township shoot down that township’s budget. And it could force election offices like Shew’s to verify thousands of petition responses with almost nothing to vouch for their authenticity.

And these are just the things that it’s clear to him that HB 2745 could do.

“We like very clear laws and policies that make things very easy,” Shew said. “The fact that there is no structure to this is the thing that’s really concerning.”

HB 2745 passed the Republican-controlled Kansas Legislature last week and now awaits a signature or a veto from Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly. It’s a bill that would trigger a petition process when cities, counties and certain other taxing jurisdictions planned to collect more money in property taxes than they did the previous year, adjusted for inflation.

The process is triggered when a local government notifies its county officials that it intends to increase its property tax collections by more than the average Consumer Price Index from the previous year, or by more than 3%. If the petition received signatures from 10% of the taxing jurisdiction’s registered voters, the government wouldn’t be allowed to set its mill levy beyond the “revenue-neutral rate,” or the rate that would be required to collect the same amount of money in taxes as the previous year.

Two factors determine how much a government collects in property taxes each year: the mill levy or property tax rate, which is set by the government, and the assessed value of the properties being taxed, which is determined by county appraisers based on the properties’ fair market value. The bill’s petition process is based on the amount of property tax revenue a government plans to collect, not the property tax rate, which means it could be triggered just by a rise in property values.

And once it’s triggered, it’s not a question of whether there will be a petition – it requires county governments to create and publish petitions on their own, without taxpayers ever needing to get involved.

Shew and his office have already begun preparing in case the bill becomes law. He said many questions remain unanswered at this stage, and that the bill itself “is very disorganized, the way it’s set up.”

“There’s a lot of stuff that’s silent in this,” Shew said.

Here’s a look at what we do know right now about HB 2745 and what it would do in Douglas County.

A few dozen voters

In many parts of Douglas County, Shew said, it wouldn’t take many voters to block a tax increase. Some jurisdictions would require only a few dozen signatures.

Douglas County itself has about 80,000 registered voters, so a petition to block a county budget proposal would need the signatures of about 8,000 people. Shew said that Lawrence had 61,839 registered voters, Eudora had 4,357, Baldwin City had 3,055 and Lecompton had 381.

That means it would take 6,184 voters to block a tax increase in Lawrence; 436 in Eudora, 306 in Baldwin City, and just 38 in Lecompton.

Shew said there are also smaller entities in the county – the townships – that would be “more susceptible.” Clinton Township has only 591 voters and Grant Township has just 306, meaning just 59 or 31 voters could be enough to block a tax increase by those townships.

“For our smaller entities, I think the bar is a lot lower,” Shew said.

The petition process

Normally, a protest petition is organized by citizens. They’re the ones who initiate the process, go around gathering signatures in person and hand them in to the county election office in a single batch. But protests under HB 2745 would be very different.

In an HB 2745 petition process, county elections offices would design and publish petition forms; send them out by mail for people to sign and return; provide them on their website for people to print out; and collect them as they came in, not in one big batch.

Shew said this would be fraught with logistical problems.

Any other type of petition is subject to a state statute that outlines “what makes a valid petition,” Shew said. Among other things, it says the people circulating the petitions have to make a notarized statement saying that they personally witnessed each person sign the petition, “basically to keep somebody from signing a bunch of names.” And the signatures all have to be turned in in a single batch.

“You can’t turn in a petition piecemeal,” Shew said.

But an HB 2745 petition would be the definition of piecemeal. Shew said that signatures could be submitted in batches, or a person could sign their own individual document and submit it. They could be submitted at the election office, the clerk’s office, or the treasurer’s office. And none of them would have anything to certify them or vouch for the people who signed them.

“Hundreds of pages coming into three different offices,” Shew said, “none of which have any kind of notary or certification.”

This means that county governments would face the challenge of verifying the validity of all of the signatures, Shew said. His office does have voters’ signatures on file, he said, so they could be compared that way, but there’s little security or certification involved in the process other than “here’s a blank piece of paper that people can sign.”

People could get that blank piece of paper in many different ways – the county’s website or social media, in person at the offices, or even in their mailbox.

Counties are already required to send a notification to property owners when local governments intend to exceed the revenue neutral rate. With HB 2745, Shew said, they would have to add on an extra signature page to that letter that lists the protest petitions available to sign for that property. This could take the form of a series of boxes for each taxing jurisdiction that people could check or initial to join the petition. Taxpayers could then return the page themselves to the county election office, treasurer or clerk.

That format raises additional questions, such as how the county will verify who is eligible to sign which petitions.

“They may check all of them while only qualifying for one,” Shew said.

All of these new responsibilities will fall on the counties – “All, also by the way, while we’re running an election in August and preparing for one in October,” he said.

A matter of weeks

There’s more complexity involved in the timeline than just doing this extra work during election season. Depending on when certain things happen in a local government’s budget process, the timeline for a petition and for the government to react to it could be as tight as a few weeks.

There are a few important deadlines set by the state in a local government budget process. First is the deadline for the government to notify the county clerk of its intent to exceed the revenue neutral rate, which is July 20. Second is the deadline for the government to hold a budget hearing, which is Sept. 20. And third is the deadline for the finished budget to be submitted to the county clerk, which is Oct. 1.

The City of Lawrence typically completes these steps close to those dates. Last year, for instance, the City Commission held its discussion on the revenue neutral rate on July 15, held budget hearings on Sept. 2, and adopted the 2026 budget on Sept. 16.

HB 2745 wouldn’t change any of those deadlines. But it would add two more deadlines to the process: Aug. 10 and Sept. 15.

Aug. 10 would be the deadline for the county to make protest petitions available to the public. The county could make them available earlier than this, but it doesn’t appear they could be made available before the county received notice from the local government.

Sept. 15 would be the deadline for the petition to reach the threshold of 10% or more of registered voters. The county would then have one week to check whether the petition met the requirements. If it did, the budget proposal “shall be deemed disapproved” and the local government would not be permitted to adopt any budget that’s not revenue-neutral.

“You have petition stuff in the middle of September,” Shew said. “The hearings for everyone’s final budgets have occurred by that moment.”

There won’t be time for governments to redo their entire budget process, because the bill doesn’t provide governments any extra time if the petition is valid. Their budget would still be due at the beginning of October. Because of this, Shew said, governments may need to create a backup plan in case of a petition.

“An entity would almost need to create two budgets,” he said.

How much leeway governments would have depends on when everyone does each of the steps in the budget process. If all of the groups involved were to wait until the last minute, there would be a window of about five weeks for the protest petition to be filed (Aug. 10 to Sept. 15), and then just over a week (Sept. 22 to Oct. 1) for the final budget to be approved and submitted.

Shew doesn’t want to put governments in that position.

In the conversations his office has had, he’s said they would likely be collecting petition signatures every single day and doing a running total that they could share with the public – “hey, you’re at 50% of the number you need.” That way, they would know as far as possible in advance if a petition was valid and could give governments the maximum amount of time to prepare.

“The last thing we would want to do is wait until that last day,” Shew said.