Rural Nebraska must stay vigilant to happenings in Lincoln. Without vigilance, there will be efforts to throw some of us under the bus. One such effort in the Nebraska Legislature could be Legislative Bill 1038.

LB 1038 seeks to drive down property taxes in higher levy school districts by increasing state funding of those schools. Unfortunately, as introduced, it would accomplish this by stripping Nebraskans of two key property tax credit programs and impose huge property tax increases on many Nebraskans.

Perhaps a little history is in order. In 2017, the main property tax relief tool was the Property Tax Credit Fund, funded at $225 million per year. In 2018, the Legislature increased the appropriation to this fund by $50 million, to $275 million. The 2020 budget increased it to $313 million.

In 2020, the adoption of LB 1107 put in place a statutory minimum in this fund and added language to ensure that gambling dollars added to the fund would be in addition to the statutory minimum. With the adoption of LB 243 in 2023, the statutory minimum for the fund will grow to $550 million by 2029, plus the gambling dollars, and will increase by the allowable growth rate. This credit appears on your tax statement as a non-ag or ag-land tax credit, reducing your bill by the amount shown.

In addition, LB 1107 put in place a new program for property tax relief by providing a refundable income tax credit for a portion of school taxes paid. With LB 873 in 2022, the amount of this credit was set at $560 million per year for 2023 and 2024. With the help of LB 243, it was set to grow to $700-$800 million by 2029. With the passage of LB 34 in 2024, it was set at $780 million for fiscal year ’25-’26 and growing from there.

With the “front loading” mechanism in LB 34, this credit, like the Property Tax Credit Fund, also appears on your statement as the school tax credit and is deducted from your tax bill.

The above credits will represent, by 2029, roughly $1.2 billion in property tax relief over and above what was in place in 2017. The credits also represent an enormous amount of hard work by a lot of folks to get relief for everyday Nebraskans. Ask any current or former senator, stakeholder, governor or governors’ team member who was involved in any of those efforts, and they will tell you that none of this came easily. Now we have a proposal, LB 1038, to undo that work.

Another common theme in those efforts to establish and refine both property tax credit programs was a desire to provide tax relief to all Nebraskans. All Nebraska taxpayers, urban or rural, ag land, residential or commercial, need and deserve property tax relief.

The credit programs described above provide relief to all, unlike LB 1038, which appears to benefit some property taxpayers by increasing property taxes on others.

And what about that increase? In my local Boone County school district, the combination of the property tax credit fund and the school district tax credit combine to reduce the tax paid on a typical piece of ag land by about 39%. Stripping away the state tax credits and moving them to other relief as proposed in LB 1038 would increase some local tax bills here by 65%.

I do note that preliminary modeling of LB 1038 indicates an increase in state aid to my local district equal to about 12% of its most recent tax asking. But even if the entirety of the state aid increase is used to drive down tax asking, the net impact of the loss of the credits and small increase in state aid is to force a nearly 60% property tax increase on the typical ag land owner in my district. That’s indefensible.

All Nebraskans deserve additional property tax relief. Prioritizing help for people with higher levies also is understandable. However, providing relief to some taxpayers by raising property taxes on others is unconscionable.

Tom Briese, who previously served as state treasurer and as a state senator, lives and farms in Boone County, Nebraska.

This story was published by Nebraska Examiner, an editorially independent newsroom providing a hard-hitting, daily flow of news. Read the original article: https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2026/02/01/opinion-property-taxpayers-should-pay-attention-this-year/