The Advertiser’s Jerry Burris writes Echoes of California’s Prop. 13 in Kauai tax case with thoughts about the County of Kauai ex rel. Nakazawa v. Baptiste appeal:
There are some interesting legal niceties in this case that will become fodder for law school classes for years to come.
The first is the oddity that the complainant in this case is the County of Kaua’i, which effectively sued itself to block implementation of the charter amendment. County officials argued that the budgetmaking process would be in chaos if property tax collections (which provide the lion’s share of the budget) were arbitrarily limited. Pacific Legal Foundation lawyers essentially said, come on, county lawyers should be defending this new law, not attacking it.
The other legal complexity is that there is confusion about who is “the county” when it comes to deciding how property taxes should be imposed. Is it the council and the administration, or is it the residents and taxpayers of Kaua’i?