February 2020
By Jennifer Ito, Justin Scoggins, and Manuel Pastor
This report is an update of Getting Real About Reform: Estimating Revenue Gains for Changes to California’s System of Assessing Commercial Real Estate, a report released in May 2015 that sought to provide empirical analysis to help generate a new level of civic—and civil—conversation about structural changes to the state’s property tax system and revenue implications (Ito, Scoggins, and Pastor 2015).
This is our third round of exploring one question: How much additional revenue would be generated through the 1-percent general tax levy if commercial and industrial property were assessed at market value? In Getting Real About Reform II, we estimate that an additional 11.4 billion dollars, or between 10.3 and 12.6 billion dollars, in property tax revenues would be available in 2021-22 if all commercial and industrial property were assessed at market value.