OUR VIEW: Maybe Nebraska Doesn't Have A Property Tax Problem

Nebraska's vote-seeking politicians sound like a broken record repeating, "Property taxes, property taxes, property taxes."

The populists presiding in the pillar of the Plains are trying to hike Nebraska's sales tax to subsidize residents' local property tax bills with state dollars. (Believe it or not, Nebraska isn't the only Republican-led state experimenting with tax swaps.)

But hold onto your hats, state senators: Maybe Nebraska doesn't really have a property tax problem.

Maybe -- just maybe -- the real issues are Nebraska's property values and what Nebraskans are willing to pay for real estate nowadays.  

The fact is, a large portion of Nebraska's real property valuations and asking prices are out of whack with the rest of the country, minus the coasts.

By paying unjustifiably high prices for homes and land, well-to-do (or well-credited) Nebraskans are driving up property taxes for everybody else.

Here are some examples:

• Remember farmers paying $10,000 to $12,000 an acre for irrigated farm ground a few years ago? Under the most optimistic scenarios, it would take 40-plus years to make enough money in farming to break even on ground at such elevated prices. When farmers outbid other farmers to extreme levels, all ag ground owners suffer from higher property taxes because the sale of that ground affects property values. The only ones who win are those selling at the inflated prices.

• Right now, in nearby communities such as Milford, Denton and Roca, it's common to see home asking prices around $400,000, $500,000 and more. These are mostly modest homes for which your parents or grandparents would have never paid more than $150,000 -- even today -- and they'd rightly slap you upside the head for even thinking about paying such prices now. Inflation has been very low over the past 15 years, so we can't blame that for these outrageous home prices. Instead, we can look at the fact that little -- if any -- middle class homes have been constructed over the past two decades in many communities, while home builders focus only on McMansions. 

Before we beg the pandering politicians in Lincoln to help solve a problem we've created, let's look at ourselves and our neighbors and rethink the prices we're paying for real estate. 

People are quick to complain about the price of pharmaceuticals, blaming drug makers for charging too much. But they rarely complain that sellers of real estate are asking too much, or about those bidding up the price. Instead, people say: "That's the free market. Supply and demand."

The free market requires that government stay out of this mess. It also demands the use of common sense before buyers mindlessly pay whatever sellers are asking. And it requires allowing those who've overpaid to fail when they go underwater, whether they be farmers or homeowners.

What does all this have to do with Dorchester?

In Dorchester, both home prices and property taxes are at reasonable levels. Our community has a real opportunity to market itself as a low-cost alternative where sanity still exists.