Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jennifer McCormick told Indianapolis radio show hosts Wednesday that her property tax relief plan will consider possible impacts on local units of government.
Speaking with Rob Kendall and Casey Daniels, hosts of WIBC-FM’s “Kendall and Casey” program, McCormick said, “We cannot look at property taxes in isolation. Our taxing system is complex, and so it needs to be reviewed all at once.”
McCormick’s comments come after U.S. Sen. Mike Braun, the state’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, and Donald Rainwater, the Libertarian candidate, proposed their own property tax relief plans. McCormick has yet to release a property tax relief plan but says it’s coming.
“Here’s what I won’t do: I won’t lie to Hoosiers and say we can cut it all without options of revenue, because our towns, our cities, our schools, our libraries cannot survive if we just start cutting taxes with no revenue replacement ideas,” McCormick told the hosts.
McCormick supports medical marijuana as a new revenue stream: “It’s time we have a well-regulated industry, start with medical [marijuana], learn from states around us … and then look at rolling into recreational.”
Her plan, she said, will also factor in the wishes of the Indiana General Assembly, whose State and Local Tax Review Task Force continues to examine the state and local tax structure, including property taxes, ahead of the new legislative session.
“I think it would be irresponsible of anyone who would be looking at that governor’s position to ignore the legislative body because, obviously, they are going to play a huge role in this,” McCormick said. “Being committed to working with everyone regarding this problem is the best way to approach it.”
Yet McCormick criticized Republicans’ handling of Hoosiers’ increased property tax bills: “If they really wanted to fix it, as a party, they would have already fixed it.”
McCormick, once a Republican, broke from the party because it, in her estimation, lacked fiscal responsibility, transparency, accountability and an “appetite for local control.”
The final state superintendent of public instruction, McCormick said she is particularly cognizant of the impact property tax cuts would have on schools. McCormick said an overreliance on referendums, at the direction of Republican leadership, has risked creating a system of “haves and have-nots” and has put some local communities in a difficult position.
“That is what has been incentivized to our local [school] districts regarding what do you do if you can’t fund teachers, or what do you do if your roof is leaking and your property tax caps — your circuit breaker — [have] maxed you out,” McCormick said of Republican leadership’s guidance. “Their 100% answer to that is, every single time — ask any local superintendent — ‘Run a referendum.’”
She proposed bolstering the school funding formula so that fewer districts are forced to go to referendum to meet their needs.
Braun recently revised his property tax relief plan so that “all Hoosier homeowners’ tax bills will be reset to the lower of their 2021 tax bill” or a new bill with greater homestead deductions. (Total property tax bills on owner-occupied homes increased statewide by 9% in 2021, 9.2% in 2022 and 16.7% in 2023, according to a Legislative Services Agency report.)
Braun’s campaign has not released calculations on how much his proposal would reduce property tax collections or addressed possible replacements for potentially hundreds of millions in revenue declines for public school districts and local governments, which receive more than 90% of property tax revenue.
Rainwater has proposed capping property taxes at 1% of a property’s purchase price for a maximum of seven years. He said his plan would end “perpetual property taxes.” Griffin Reid, the Indiana GOP’s communications director, has argued Rainwater’s plan would front-load Hoosiers’ property tax payments in the first seven years. Reid has called Rainwater’s plan “unrealistic” and said it would “destroy the housing market.”
During the Wednesday interview, McCormick also lambasted Republicans for their education policies, especially their support of vouchers, which she argued takes money away from public schools.
The democratic candidate added she fears Republicans could end access to birth control “if extremism takes over the statehouse.”
Pressed to pinpoint when in a pregnancy an abortion should no longer be allowed, McCormick told the hosts: “There’s no magic time of that, right, because when you look at what’s happening in a pregnancy no one says at 10 weeks that’s the magic time when you should be making a decision. Things happen. Especially in incest and rape — how Indiana has made it so restricted — that when you get to that point, many people don’t even know they are pregnant.”
Contact Jarred Meeks on X @jarredsmeeks or email him at [email protected].