Property tax cuts won’t be on the ballot in Wyoming this year.
The Wyoming Secretary of State’s Office confirmed Tuesday that the committee pushing a property tax cut ballot initiative had not filed signatures by the deadline to get the measure on the 2024 ballot. Signatures have to be filed before the start of the legislative session of the year applicants wish to put their measure up for a vote. This year’s session started Monday.
“The Committee of Applicants has not filed their petitions with our office,” Joe Rubino, chief policy officer for the Secretary of State’s Office, said in a Tuesday email to WyoFile. “In order for the initiative to appear on the 2024 ballot, petitions would need to have been filed prior to the commencement of the 2024 Legislative Session.”
Rubino noted that committee members still have 18 months from the date they received their petitions from the Secretary of State’s Office to gather the required signatures and put their measure on the ballot for a future election (the next being in 2026). This particular initiative has until mid-April 2025 to continue collecting signatures.
“We fully intend to still file,” former Republican gubernatorial candidate Brent Bien, who is leading the statewide ballot initiative, told WyoFile. “We’re also watching this legislative session to see if any meaningful tax relief comes out.”
Bien told WyoFile that committee members still intended to get the measure on the 2024 ballot. But the Secretary of State’s Office confirmed that they would not be able to do so.
Though Wyoming has some of the lowest property taxes in the U.S., skyrocketing housing prices in parts of the state have put a strain on homeowners carrying the burden of higher tax bills. That’s led to a grassroots push for property tax reform. This measure is one of several attempts to address the situation, the other being several measures under consideration in the statehouse.
The ballot measure would slash property taxes while also cutting into local government funding. It proposes to exempt 50% of the assessed value for property used as a primary residence for at least six months a year. The owner would need to have been a state resident for at least one year to qualify.
The Secretary of State’s Office and the Department of Revenue’s fiscal analysis of the initiative estimated it would result in local revenue losses of $137 million in 2025 and $141 million in 2026. (Money from property taxes doesn’t go to the state. It goes to local governments.)
But that hasn’t deterred tax reform advocates.
“We’re still cooking along,” Bien told WyoFile.
He said around 600 volunteers around the state are still out collecting signatures for the measure and estimated that the initiative has garnered close to 40,000 signatures, though these still have to be validated. Signatures can be invalidated when, for example, there are repeats, or the signee is not a registered Wyoming voter. The property tax initiative will need 29,730 valid signatures, with 15% of voters from at least 16 Wyoming counties included in that count.
“We’re just looking at voter rolls, those kinds of things,” Bien said. “So we’re not sure exactly where we stand with this stuff, and that’s kind of where we’re sitting.”
The ballot initiative process allows citizens to bypass the Legislature and put issues up for a vote. But getting a proposal on the ballot is arduous — particularly in Wyoming, which has the most stringent signature requirements of any state in the country, according to Ballotpedia.
Addressing rising residential property taxes is a priority for the Legislature this year. Besides five committee-sponsored bills, individual lawmakers have so far brought more than a dozen additional measures aimed at addressing the issue. Several of these bills have already died in the first couple of days of the session.
This article has been updated to clarify that the committee has until April 2025 to collect signatures.
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