On Mon­day, the oth­er shoe fell on the long-dis­cussed is­sue of prop­er­ty tax. Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Lar­ry Howai an­nounced in his bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion that land and build­ing tax­es would re­turn.In the first phase, set for im­ple­men­ta­tion by Ju­ly 1, 2014, tax­es will come due on in­dus­tri­al lands and build­ings; then tax­es on com­mer­cial prop­er­ties will be as­sessed and levied; and in Phase 3–the most del­i­cate sec­tor–tax­es on agri­cul­tur­al lands and res­i­den­tial prop­er­ties will be as­sessed and ap­plied.

As the Fi­nance Min­is­ter not­ed, "A land and build­ing tax regime is a key pil­lar in all mod­ern tax sys­tems," but in all suc­cess­ful im­ple­men­ta­tions of such tax­a­tion sys­tems, the meth­ods of as­sess­ment and val­u­a­tion are clear­ly un­der­stood by every­one.Cloud­ing this rather straight­for­ward mat­ter is the busi­ness of pol­i­tics and in par­tic­u­lar, the heat­ed cam­paign to "axe the tax" which was waged when the PNM Gov­ern­ment sought to over­haul the ex­ist­ing process.

Clear­ly, it was a sys­tem which was in need of over­haul, with tax­es be­ing levied on build­ings that bore no re­la­tion­ship to their cur­rent mar­ket val­ue.But through the ex­i­gen­cies of po­lit­i­cal pos­tur­ing, what hap­pened was nei­ther an or­der­ly and sen­si­ble re­vi­sion of the land and build­ing tax reg­i­men nor a con­tin­u­a­tion of the pri­or, whol­ly in­ad­e­quate sys­tem.In­stead, the tax was frozen in 2010, cost­ing the gov­ern­ment mil­lions in rev­enue that it needs to sup­port in­creas­ing­ly cost­ly bud­get spend­ing.