But Rhode Island towns revalue every three years. This insures that new owners will be sensibly and fairly taxed on the value of the house they bought using a fair rate based on market values. But what happens to everyone else?

In every revaluation, properties change in value by different amounts, some go up a lot, some a little, some may even drop in value. The result is that thousands will pay much more taxes and thousands will pay less than the prior year, even if the town doesn't need any tax increase! Does this make any sense?

Even more bizarre, if the value of less expensive homes rose more than the more expensive homes, their owners will pay lots more taxes to offset the lower taxes paid by the owners of the more expensive homes whose values didn't rise as much.

As the above demonstrates, a revaluation does tax new owners properly but it does not tax existing owners properly. Without revaluation the opposite is true - existing owners pay a rational tax but new owners don't. Our current market based system coupled with revaluations is always wrong for someone.

REPLACE THE PROPERTY TAX WITH AN OWNERS TAX

With an Owners Tax the tax bill is based on the prior year's tax bill, adjusted just enough to fund the tax levy, similar to what currently happens to tax bills in a non-revaluation year. If the levy increased say 3.4%, everyone gets a 3.4% increase.

Since new owners have no prior tax bill , their first Owners Tax is based on the current assessed value of their purchase, just as in a standard revaluation year. This becomes their prior tax and their future tax bills will be adjusted the same as everyone else.