This Thanksgiving season, should we be thankful about Gov. Jared Polis’s extraordinary session that took on the governor’s robust failure of Proposition HH to solve the world’s problems?

Okay, Proposition HH was only trying to solve Colorado’s problems. Okay, Proposition HH was really trying to save us from TABOR problems.

One lesson Gov. Polis learned in the resounding defeat of his legacy initiative was people didn’t want property tax relief at the expense of TABOR refunds. Coloradans want property tax relief and TABOR refunds. Time will tell if equal TABOR refunds of about $800 each rather than tiered refunds will be good enough for voters.

The three-day extraordinary session (that took four days) does deal with a lot of money. HB23B-1001 puts $30 million toward eviction rent relief to cover a variety of rental expenses, from rent itself to utility bills, etc. The money will be distributed by non-profits through grants. This bill is supposed to give some renters a break because they won’t receive the property tax reduction that homeowners will get. Give thanks.

Stay up to speed: Sign-up for daily opinion in your inbox Monday-Friday

HB23B-1003 will increase the state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for every eligible taxpayer from 25% to 50% of the EITC claimed on federal tax returns. No social security number is required if the taxpayer is eligible for the federal EITC. This will use $182 million in TABOR refund dollars so the legislation will not affect the state’s general fund. Give thanks.

On the eating side, SB23-002 will provide more than $6 million for monthly food and nutrition benefits for low-income children in summer months. Give thanks.

SB23B-001 gives residential property owners a reduction in the 6.765% valuation rate to 6.7%, and an increase in exempted value from $15,000 to $55,000 in 2023 only. Many homeowners will nevertheless experience sticker shock when they get their property tax bills in January. That’s because residential property values have soared across the state, a poorly-timed increase on the heels of the governor-sponsored removal of the Gallagher Amendment from the state Constitution.

John Gallagher, now passed away, and his constitutional amendment saved residential property taxpayers $35 billion from 1982 until the time of its removal from the constitution. The business community hated the Gallagher Amendment because it increased commercial property taxes. Now residential property owners who voted to remove Gallagher can spend Thanksgiving ruing their decision, but give thanks there’s a home to sleep in and a table for dinner.

Local governments won’t be all that thankful as their prospective revenue increase from residential property tax collections will go down. To put a finger in the hole in this part of the dike, the state will push up to $54 million back to local governments.

School districts will also experience a cut in expected revenue. The state will put another finger in another hole in the dike with $146 million transferred from the state’s General Fund to the School Education Fund to cover the missing money.

Changes to property tax rates will reduce the tax amount by about $433.7 million, according to the SB23B-001’s fiscal note. The backfill will cover just under half this amount, so local governments and school districts may continue to be in a financial pinch.

The governor was hoping to eliminate the annual debt to school finance this year, but who knows if that will occur? Even if he got rid of the annual funding deficit and bulked up money for schools to keep up with population growth and inflation as Amendment 23 in the Constitution supposedly requires, his plan wouldn’t touch the biggest K-12 debt. The state owes about $10 billion to the children educated in our public K-12 system since 2010. That’s a full generation of underfunded students who have nevertheless struggled through the state’s CMAS standardized testing program to determine how effectively we’ve not educated them.

On the “let’s see if we can study our way out of our problem” side, everyone should give thanks for the bill to create a Property Tax Task Force to find ways to “protect property owners and residential tenants from rising property taxes while meeting the needs of governments that rely on property taxes to pay for local services.” If the commission only examines property taxes, it’s in a bind. It can tinker with rates on the residential and commercial sides, but will that tinkering result in adequate funding for the rising cost of local government services?

There was a great deal of arguing about who will be appointed to this property tax commission. There will be 19 members, with four members appointed by House and Senate leadership split between Dems and GOP. Counties from different regions of the state will join a mayor, the executive director of the special district association, a fire chief, a school district chief operating officer, a business community leader, a low-income expert, etc. It’s a potpourri of Coloradans for whom we can be thankful they know a lot about taxes, we hope. It’s supposed to be a bipartisan if not a non-partisan group.

As to the 2023 property tax solutions out of the extraordinary session, bipartisanship did not play out. The seven of 13 bills that passed made it through with Democrats voting “yes” and Republicans voting “no.”

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.