SESSION: Lower taxes priority

Attention Idaho legislators: Your 2019 session is coming up soon. I hope you can get legislation going to reduce cost to taxpayers, especially seniors living on fixed incomes!

One way I can see a positive way to reduce the tax debt to seniors is to cut the number of public school districts to 44, one per county. Having 115 public school districts seems excessively overtaxed for a small state population of 1.6 million.

We’ve lived in Idaho for more than 18 years and have seen many school levies. What a total ripoff to taxpayers. Especially seniors like us over 65 who should be exempt from all these school levies.

We lived in Nevada more than 36 years before moving here and never saw one levy put up for taxpayers to support public schools. Nevada has 23 counties and approximately the same number of public school districts as the number of counties and Nevada’s population is nearly four million.

Also, some of Nevada’s public school districts were quite large. The Las Vegas district was the seventh largest school district in the U.S. when we lived there. Plus Nevada didn’t have a lotto system like Idaho has for revenue. I don’t know how Nevada received revenue from taxes, or how their schools were supported, but at least Nevada doesn’t have 115 public school districts to support like Idaho has.

So Idaho legislators, I hope you can get it on the agenda to save many millions of dollars for Idaho taxpayers like Nevada has done by deleting a number of school districts so taxpayers get a break on school taxes. Also, if the Legislature or the governor can get grocery taxes eliminated, that also would be great, and get state income tax dropped or eliminated totally. So if Idaho citizens want lower taxes, please contact legislators to get states taxes lowered. A very positive thing for Idaho citizens.

MONTE HILLMAN

Rathdrum