It was a dramatic sine die in Georgia: a session-ending scramble with lawmakers racing to deliver property tax relief for embattled homeowners before time ran out.
When the original vehicle for reform, HB 1116, failed in the Senate, key pieces of the package were folded into SB 33, a bill originally aimed at imposing regulations on consumable hemp products and farming.
The procedural twist may have been unusual, but the political pressure behind it was not.
“It’s the No. 1 issue in our inbox, as elected officials,” Republican state Rep. Shaw Blackmon said in an interview with Realtor.com®. “Affordability, and then property tax being at the top of that list.”
It’s a sentiment being felt well beyond Georgia, as states across the country grapple with mounting pressure to deliver property tax relief. The responses have ranged from phased relief efforts to attempts at outright abolition.
Blackmon had been a vocal advocate for more sweeping reform, and the original version of HB 1116, which he sponsored, would have eventually phased out local property taxes on homesteads. But it was the narrower relief plan aimed at slowing the growth of those taxes that ultimately won enough votes to pass.
What happened in Georgia underscores how difficult it is to deliver comprehensive reform of a deeply entrenched tax system, even when both the political appetite and the voter frustration are obvious.
Blackmon said this is only a starting point.
“We don’t think this issue is a one-and-done,” he said. “We’re going to build on the relief that we’ve given this year.”
What survived the final deal
Whatever the procedural chaos at the Capitol, Georgia homeowners can still expect concrete relief.
Some of the key provisions originally outlined in HB 1116 made their way into SB 33. Among the most meaningful is a homeowner relief grant that, according to Blackmon, should deliver roughly $500 per taxpayer when Georgians receive their property tax bills this fall.
Beyond that, the bill would cap how fast tax assessments can rise and allow local governments and school systems to use an optional 1% local sales tax to fund homestead exemptions and reduce homeowners’ property tax bills.
That provision, though, would need to win approval from local voters before any local government or school system could use it to offset homeowners’ property tax bills.
“This year, the Georgia General Assembly took meaningful steps toward delivering property tax relief to homeowners across the state,” Speaker Jon Burns, a Republican, said in a statement to Realtor.com. “This was just the beginning of what’s to come in future legislative sessions, and the House looks forward to continuing fighting for Georgia’s homeowners.”
So how did property tax relief get rolled into a hemp bill?
But for any of this relief to become a reality, it needs to first be signed into law. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, now has 40 days to review the legislation before making a decision.
In response to a request from Realtor.com, Kemp’s office declined to comment on the bill’s future during the review process.
“All legislation undergoes a thorough review process and we will provide an update at the conclusion of that process,” Carter Chapman, the governor’s press secretary, said.
There already is some speculation that Kemp may call lawmakers back for a special session to take another go at property tax relief, in part because of the dramatic way the bill was passed.
The procedural move of wrapping property tax relief into a totally unrelated bill itself is not especially unusual. One of the easiest ways to revive a dead proposal is to strip out an existing one and use it as the new vehicle.
That’s exactly what happened here, but this maneuver was perhaps especially rushed. Capitol Beat reports that, with time running out on sine die, Senate Republicans unveiled their rewrite less than 30 minutes before midnight and pushed it through the House as the session stretched toward 1 a.m.
But even that isn’t the core issue. Instead, the controversy seems to lie with the powers of each house.
AJC reports that some Democratic lawmakers are now suggesting the proposal is unconstitutional because Georgia law requires revenue-raising measures to originate in the House—posing further challenges for the relief to become a reality.
Representatives from the Georgia Senate were not immediately available for comment on the bill.
Why Georgia’s compromise matters beyond the state
Georgia’s end-of-session scramble says something larger about where property tax politics are heading nationally.
Many of the proposals that have surfaced in state legislatures have been aimed at fundamentally changing how property taxes work for homeowners and local governments. But the measures actually becoming law are often much narrower than the rhetoric that surrounds them.
Montana may be the rare outlier. After a session marked by heated debate and dozens of competing proposals, lawmakers there were able to pass a landmark reform that lowered taxes on homesteads by shifting more of the burden onto second homes and some commercial properties. But even in Montana, the road was hardly clean: The Legislature’s original proposal died before being revived through another bill.
That messiness may be one of the clearest lessons for other states now flirting with sweeping property tax reform. In Georgia’s neighbor Florida, for example, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has repeatedly hinted at calling lawmakers back for a special session to pursue a major overhaul that would eventually exempt all homestead properties. He has framed the question largely as one of timing and made clear that he wants to put that plan before voters in November.
Georgia suggests the path may be far less direct. Big promises can quickly run into the realities of legislative deadlines and the difficulty of replacing local government revenue. But that does not mean the push fades once a narrower compromise passes.
As Blackmon put it, “We’ll probably start with the things that did not get across the finish line this session.”