Brad Sherman, a Republican candidate for governor, says reducing property taxes is a priority, but he suggests taking a sledgehammer to the system and completely eliminating property taxes isn’t doable.
“I would love to see no property tax,” Sherman said. “It’d be great, but I don’t know there’s a way to fund our essential services, you know, if we were to cut out all property taxes. How do you do that?”
Sherman said he can think of “only two ways” to pay for police, fire and other essential services if the property tax is eliminated — either raise the state sales tax or use state income tax revenue. “And we’ve been cutting income tax, so that’s something we probably shouldn’t look at right now,” Sherman said, “but a sales tax, to replace a property tax elimination, it would be a big sales tax and then it would have to be collected by the state.”
Eddie Andrews and Adam Steen, two other Republicans who are running governor, support eliminating Iowa property taxes, however Steen has said immediate elimination would be irresponsible. Andrews has suggested setting up a process to phase out property taxes and he said the simplest way to accomplish that goal is to increase the sales tax.
Not all areas of the state have enough retail establishments that would collect the sales taxes needed to fund local services, according to Sherman. “Some counties have a lot of retail, other counties don’t have hardly any retail, so one county would go broke (and) the other would have a…boom and so you would have to collect that centrally by the state and then it would have to be doled out in many ways and that would be a big problem,” Sherman said. “And centralized government always scares me, you know, I believe in decentralized government.”
Sherman proposes reducing property taxes for people who’ve lived in Iowa for at least a decade and own their own home. “When you hit 60 or 65 for seniors, that then their primary residence could be tax free. A very small sales tax could cover that, but even that in itself might end up paying for itself because people would stay in Iowa then instead of actually moving to another state when they retire because now they have a home,” Sherman said. “Plus it would protect seniors on low income from losing their homes.”
Sherman made his comments during a recent appearance on “Iowa Press” on Iowa PBS. Sherman is a pastor from Williamsburg who served one term in the Iowa House. He launched his campaign for governor in February before fellow Republican Kim Reynolds announced she would not seek reelection.
