Governor Larry Rhoden is trying all the lines Ian Fury can hand him to oppose the effort to refer and repeal Senate Bill 245, Rhoden’s plan to use this year’s reserves and next year’s sales tax hike to lower property tax on houses. In addition to saying the referrers don’t understand the law, Rhoden is misrepresenting the petition drive as a push for higher taxes and big government:
“I don’t see a path to success for a ballot measure that would ask the voters to raise property taxes and increase state government spending with those dollars” [Gov. Larry Rhoden, quoted in Anya Joseph, “Coalition Seeks to Refer Sales Tax Increase to Voters,” KELO-TV, 2026.04.30].
BUZZZZ—false! Referring SB 245 does not ask voters to increase any taxes or government spending.
Technically, a No vote on SB 245, if the referendum makes the ballot, does not itself enact any increase in taxes. It leaves the property tax system as it is now, pre-SB 245. We can argue (and Rhoden evidently plans to) about practical effects—property taxes would have gone down with SB 245, but you voted against SB 245, so you took away the decrease, and that’s the same as an increase!—but we can also argue that SB 245 doesn’t lower property taxes: it collects money intended for that purpose, but the state still has to decide to disburse that money, and school boards still have to decide how much or even whether to lower their property tax levies.
Rhoden is more clearly wrong on his claim that a vote to repeal SB 245 will be a vote to spend more government money. Voting against SB 245 will not mandate spending a single dollar more on any government program. I can certainly make arguments for spending $56 million from reserves this year and $104 million in increased sales taxes each following year on school lunches and teacher pay and parks and roads and other useful government projects, but the sponsors of referring SB 245 aren’t. Their focus, as stated on their website and in the press, is broader, less regressive tax relief than what Rhoden has proposed.
Don’t let Larry (and Ian) fool you: Voting on SB 245 isn’t about spending more money to make government bigger. Voting on SB 245 is about whether the sales tax you pay should go to additional tax breaks for homeowners. How else we might spend that sales tax—tax breaks for everybody, tax exemptions on food, investments in schools or cops or grants for CAFOs, more staff to make sure the Secretary of State stops screwing up—may be part of a longer discussion if we vote SB 245 down, but voting SB 245 down does not endorse or mandate any of those options.