This two-part project is a collaborative multi-year undertaking by Lincoln and GWIPP to promote research in the areas of property tax policy and administration. As a follow-up to the 2005-06 pilot project, a data collection team is compiling and classifying a wide range of material that characterizes property tax structures and processes in all fifty states to produce a "Compendium of State Property Tax Regimes." The compendium will be available as a data set, and researchers will be able to perform simple queries through an interactive web site. Key results will be presented in a series of tables, patterned after the biennial Significant Features of Fiscal Federalism , produced by the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) through 1994. Plans are being made to update the compendium annually.

Under the contract, GWIPP will produce the following research papers: A Calculation of Effective Tax Rates; A Broad-Based Property Tax: Calculations and Implications; A Broad-Based Property Tax: Calculations and Implications; Tax and Expenditure Limitations (TELs) and Their Impact; The Increasing Use of Preferential Assessments to Subsidize Specific Land Uses.

A State Property Tax Policy Roundtable will be scheduled for Fall 2007 in Washington, DC. Papers written by GWIPP research faculty will be supplemented by several commissioned papers, focusing on the topic “Erosion of the Local Property Tax Base: Trends and Consequences.”

A pilot project to explore the feasibility of a new annual publication, patterned after ACIR’s Significant Features of Fiscal Federalism, that would, at least partially, fill the void since it ceased publication. Prior to its demise in the mid-1990s, the US Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) published a widely used and acclaimed two volume annual report entitled Significant Features of Fiscal Federalism. The report was largely a compilation and organization of data on federal, state, and local revenues and expenditures, the institutional structure through which these fiscal flows occurred, and important changes in them. Significant Features has been sorely missed by both researchers and practitioners. No other publication has taken its place. If deemed feasible, the George Washington Institute of Public Policy (GWIPP) would then prepare a proposal for an annual version of such a report, to be funded and published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and disseminated jointly by Lincoln and GWIPP.

The project focuses on the incidence of the property tax and its significance in funding state and local government services. The purpose of the study is to help policy makers, researchers, and others interested in local government finance to better undertstand the role of the property tax.

The report consists of four parts: The first part presents data on aggregate state and local infrastructure spending – for the nation and for the 50 individual states. For this purposes we define infrastructure to include highways (including streets and bridges), mass transit, air transportation, water transportation, water supply and sewerage. We collect and report spending trends for each category of infrastructure, including total spending by category and capital spending by category, for the most recent year available (2002). The second part examines recent trends in federal intergovernmental assistance to state and local governments for infrastructure purposes. The third part is a literature review in order to develop a general understanding of the various financing mechanism used by state and local governments to finance infrastructure spending. The concluding part is an extensive literature review of the mechanisms available to state and local governments to undertake prioritization of infrastructure needs.

The project will examine recent trends in state and local revenues and expenditures and the current condition of state and local finances. In particular, it will assess the likely impact of foreseeable or potential future economic, social, political and technological changes on state and local revenues and expenditures.

Provide a synthesis and critique of current knowledge and research on 1) the factors driving local economic growth and development and 2) the effects of state and local fiscal policy upon local economic growth and development. The report will make clear where there is clear consensus, where there is disagreement, and where research is currently lacking.

The project explores the extent to which fiscal disparities exist among local jurisdictions within different kinds of metropolitan areas and why these disparities exist. We are particularly interested in the extent of fiscal disparities among suburban jurisdictions as well as between suburban jurisdictions and central cities. We calculate disparities among local governments in a small, regionally representative set of metropolitan areas. We also explore the characteristics of metropolitan areas that are associated with greater fiscal disparities. Finally, we will discuss the policy implications of these findings

The study adapts a methodology developed by the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, to calculate disparities in the revenue capacity of local governments in the Washington,DC area. It then estimates the effect a shift to a real property tax on land only would have on these disparities. We found that the major disparities were between suburban jurisdictions; Washington D.C., the core center city in the metropolitan area, had an average revenue capacity. When revenue capacity was recalculated assuming a real property tax on land only, we found this had a slight positive effect on ameloriating differencesin revenue-rising ability.