A People’s Refund for a People’s Budget
A New Community Land And Power Campaign to Claw Back The $76 Million In Tax Refunds Handed Out to Corporate Landlords To Fund Vital Community Needs
CAMPAIGN OVERVIEW
Community Land and Power (CL&P) is starting a new campaign to force Durham’s corporate landlords to return approximately $19 million in tax refunds that the county’s Board of Equalization and Review (BOER) wrongfully granted them ($9 million lost within the city budget; $10 million lost within the county budget) when they appealed their assessed values citing vacancies. The loss will equal $76 million over the next four tax years before the next reassessment unless we unite to claw back our public dollars!
Instead of funding teachers, city workers, and vital housing and services needs for residents to the extent we need to help people survive here, we are subsidizing shady landlords who choose to keep their units vacant instead of dropping the rents to affordable levels. This is effectively county-authorized theft from public coffers, and approving these appeals is not mandated. The BOER could choose to value them like every other homeowner’s property, but they aren’t. Investor owners are getting special privileges and the lion’s share of successful appeals worth millions. Now the county is going to tax homeowners even more to make up for the losses caused by their handouts to corporate landlords. Together we can claw back our public dollars! (see more info below & follow us on Instagram)
Breaking news:
An INDY Week Investigation by
Lena Gellar and Lee Gans
TOGETHER WE CAN Claw Back our Public Dollars AND FUND A PEOPLE’S BUDGET!
While city workers, firefighters and teachers are all facing wage stagnation and there is still a massive gap in funding vital community needs, CL&P is organizing a collective force to appeal the corporate tax appeals. Sign up for updates (see form on this page) and join future events to help recover our public funds, to learn about how we got here through the city and county privileging and subsidizing corporate landlords and developers, and to learn how we can use our collective rage and power to shift the political priorities in service of our communities’ actual housing and survival needs.
This will be a living, breathing We Take Care of Us and We Keep Us Safe initiative.
Clawing the funds back is just one part of the campaign. We will simultaneously be making demands for budget justice to ensure the city and county use the returned public funds we win to refund these key workers that keep our city running as well as the community programs and services residents depend on to survive and thrive here.
We believe that we will win!