HB 59 Replacing School District M&O Property Taxes in Texas

While there are several valuable bills and ideas available this session to achieve this goal, HB 59 helps start the discussion by eliminating the school district M&O property taxes on January 1, 2024, and by creating a legislative commission in the interim to study how to replace them on that date. This bill would cut local property taxes nearly in half while adhering to the state’s constitutional responsibility of funding government schools.

The key to achieving this is restraining government spending at the state and local government levels along with reforming sales taxes to a broader-based form of the current final sales and use tax without moving Texas to other new, excessively burdensome types of consumption tax such as a value-added tax (VAT) or a carbon tax.