Splitting the Pizza: Community, Exemptions, and the Case for Property Tax with Brad Elridge

About this Episode

Brad Elridge is the county appraiser in Lawrence, Kansas, with nearly three decades in the appraisal profession — roughly half in the private sector and the other half in public service. In this conversation, he makes a deceptively simple argument: property tax isn't really a tax. It's the community splitting the bill for the services everyone already uses. That reframing — from punitive levy to shared expense — anchors a wide-ranging discussion about exemptions, assessment caps, vertical equity, and why the cultural erosion of community may be the real threat to the property tax system.

Splitting the Pizza, Not Picking Your Pocket

Brad's pitch at the neighborhood barbecue is disarming. When someone corners him on the sidewalk (he walks to work, just blocks from the courthouse), he doesn't defend the tax. He redefines it. "It says property tax, but really what it should be labeled as is shared community expenses."

This isn't spin. It's a substantive reframe. Property taxes fund fire departments that hold the line against wildfires you never even heard about. They fund the first responders, the schools, the clean water. The problem is that people experience the bill but rarely witness the disaster that didn't happen. Brad tells the story of a wildfire that crept to the county line — hundreds of first responders holding it back — and nobody in town even knew. Success is invisible, and invisible services are hard to sell.

The structural visibility problem matters, too. Income taxes hide behind withholding; property taxes arrive as a lump sum or two. Brad acknowledges that monthly billing could help but flags the administrative nightmare — in his county alone, mailing 48,000 statements monthly would cost roughly $50,000 a month before you even account for the staffing needed to manage revolving balances on constantly changing parcels.

The Exemption Trap

Brad's state has over 20 categories of exemptions. In a college town with three universities, a tribal institution, and an Army Corps of Engineers lake, roughly 20% of the county's value sits exempt from the tax rolls. That's a staggering burden shift onto the remaining 80%.

He's diplomatic about it, but his position is clear: exemptions need to be reevaluated. The administrative cost alone is significant. His office has a dedicated tax team that has to figure out how to implement each new legislative exemption — often without a playbook, often outside their existing software, always with documentation rigorous enough to survive an audit. Every hour spent on exemption administration is an hour not spent on primary valuation duties.

The political economy makes this worse over time. Narrow interest groups are highly motivated to secure their carve-out, and once one exemption exists, it creates precedent for the next. Twenty categories didn't happen overnight. They accumulated, each one perfectly reasonable in isolation, collectively creating a system that's expensive to run and fundamentally inequitable for the people still paying.

Caps: The Fastest Road to Inequity

On assessment caps, Brad doesn't mince words: "It's just the quickest way to inequity." He points to California's Prop 13 as the definitive case study — identical homes in homogeneous neighborhoods where one owner pays $2,000 and another pays $20,000, purely based on when they bought.

Caps punish mobility. They penalize new homeowners — often younger families entering the market — by shifting the burden onto them. Brad draws an apt parallel to the mortgage rate lock-in effect: just as homeowners married to their 2022 interest rates won't move, capped assessments freeze people in place. He concedes one counterargument — that long-tenured homeowners may build stronger community ties — but the trade-off is a system that actively discourages economic dynamism.

And like exemptions, caps are administratively heavy. Brad shares an anecdote from a colleague who worked in a Florida assessment office: out of 100 staff, 20 to 30 were involved in exemption and cap administration in some form. That's not a rounding error. That's a structural drag on the entire operation.

The Community Problem Underneath the Tax Problem

Perhaps the most provocative thread in this conversation is Brad's implicit argument that resistance to property taxes is really a symptom of something deeper: the collapse of community itself. When people don't feel connected to their neighbors, the idea of splitting the bill feels like an imposition rather than a contribution.

Brad ties this to observable data. Lawrence hosted World Cup events, closed down Main Street for watch parties — and retail sales still came in below the prior year. Economic signals are shifting in ways that don't follow the old playbooks. The post-COVID social recalibration is real, and it complicates every conversation about what communities owe each other.

He returns repeatedly to the idea that paying property taxes is fundamentally patriotic — not in a flag-waving sense, but in the original meaning of contributing to the commons. The community paid for your schooling; now you pay for the next generation's. That reciprocal logic only works when people feel like they belong to something.

Key Takeaway

The case for property tax isn't an economic argument — it's a community argument. If we can't convince people they belong to something worth funding, no amount of policy optimization will save the system. The real question facing assessors isn't how to value property more accurately; it's whether the public still believes the pizza is worth splitting.