The culprit, no surprise, is that 31-year-old wolf in sheep's clothing, Proposition 13, which prohibits the reassessment of any property except at the time of a change in ownership.
"The whole system is completely unenforceable," says Lenny Goldberg, a Sacramento lobbyist who, as director of the California Tax Reform Assn., has been pressing for years to institute a "split roll" -- that is, to tax commercial and industrial property differently from residential.
The idea is to reverse what has been a shift in California's property tax burden onto homeowners from business owners under Proposition 13.
In Los Angeles County, for example, single-family residences accounted for 39.9% of the tax roll, by value, in 1975, before Proposition 13. This year their share is 55.8%. In the same period, commercial-industrial property has gone from 46.6% of the tax roll to 30.9%. These figures are from the county assessor’s annual report, but a similar pattern holds statewide.
What businesses dodge, of course, the homeowner pays. It's fair to say that lots of well-off California businesses are making out like bandits at the homeowners' expense.
Goldberg calculates that Disneyland, which hasn't had a reportable change of ownership since, well, forever, is currently taxed at an average of about a nickel per square foot. For comparison, a median California home bought last year out of foreclosure, measuring 1,600 square feet and selling for about $330,000 (these are averages from the California Assn. of Realtors), would incur property tax of about $3,300 per year, or $2.06 per square foot.
On average, as the anti-tax California Taxpayers Assn. acknowledges, business property was assessed at only about 60% of its full market value as recently as 2006-07, down from a recent peak of more than 87% in 1994-95.
Bringing the percentage up to 100%, say by requiring regular reassessments of business property regardless of ownership changes, could bring the state $2 billion to $4 billion a year in new revenue, depending on who does the math.
Despite this, the split roll has been as unpopular with the voters as any other amendment of Proposition 13. The only time the proposal has made it to the ballot, as Proposition 167 in 1992, it was soundly defeated.
An effort by public employee unions to get a split-roll initiative on the ballot in 2006 didn't even make it past the signature-gathering stage.
But those were different times.
Maybe, just maybe, the voters of this financially spavined state aren't still so reluctant to close a big loophole.
Even under normal circumstances, commercial property doesn't change hands as frequently as homes do. But certainly a major cause of the category's shrinkage as a portion of the tax roll is business owners' ability to avoid reassessments -- with millions of dollars at stake, they have greater incentive to maneuver around the rules, and well-paid real estate pros to help them do so.
The cleverness of some of their maneuvers gives the lie to any claim that American business has lost its innovative edge. Over the years, critics have pointed to some truly baroque schemes.
Consider the 1997 acquisition of Mammoth Mountain ski resort by Vancouver, Canada-based Intrawest Corp. When the Mono County assessor attempted to reassess the resort, Intrawest argued that although it had acquired a majority of Mammoth's shares, it had left voting control on numerous management issues in the hands of the sellers. Therefore, it claimed, no change in ownership had occurred. That cost the county what the assessor calculated was $20 million in taxes over an eight- or nine-year period.
The resort wasn't reassessed until it was sold again -- this time in a clean 2005 deal with Starwood Capital. The new assessment was $167 million more than the old.
My favorite is the elaborate dance choreographed around the San Francisco office complex One Market Plaza.
