Payment in Lieu of Taxes

There have been a lot of questions about how M2 will affect Payment in Lieu of [Property] Taxes (PILT.) The concern is that since much of our state's surplus comes from oil and gas revenues that M2 will put an end to those revenues. This is simply not true.

John Walstad, legal council for the State Legislature wrote a memo that was introduced into the legislative record in November 2011 where he addresses this very question. You can read the entire memo here: HERE.

If you want to skip all the legalese and get to the core of the question, go to the bottom of the first column on Page 4: Effect of Measure No. 2 on Existing Tax Type where he begins to explain that a PILT that is based on property value is eliminated, but PILT that is based on something else (i.e. production value, services rendered, etc) is not affected by M2:

In these cases the Legislative Assembly has provided that the taxes are "in lieu" of property taxes, and one component of the tax is providing revenue to political subdivisions in place of what a property tax would have provided but that does not mean the tax is a property tax. What the constitutional measure prohibits is levying of a tax on the assessed value of real or personal property, and this is the standard that must be applied to "in lieu" taxes to determine if the measure would eliminate the tax.

Then go to Page 5 and scroll through the list of PILTs--mobile home tax, coal conversion tax, transmission line tax and--yes--gas and oil taxes. A few of those will be eliminated because they are based on land value. But the majority of those taxes--including gas and oil--will not be affected by passage of M2.