Rep. Cecily Williams pitches statewide property-tax map; DOR warns of significant first-year cost

Representative Cecily Williams (D-111) told the Ways and Means Committee that HB 2746 would put a property-tax mapping feature on the Department of Revenue homepage so residents could quickly compare assessed values and see the levies applied by overlapping taxing jurisdictions.

"This property tax map will actually be on the Department of Revenue's main page," Williams said, describing the tool as a transparency measure that would let homeowners and prospective buyers "quickly find partial maps, tax maps and assessed values" instead of digging through multiple county websites.

Committee members probed how the Department of Revenue would gather the data and what the fiscal impact would be. Williams acknowledged a substantial first-year development cost and cited an attached fiscal note; she said the product would require coordination with county assessors and vendors and maintenance similar to the state's sales-tax map.

Zach White, legislative director for the Missouri Department of Revenue, testified that the $7,000,000 first-year estimate came from the current vendor that built the sales-and-use tax map and stressed that a property map would be a new, separate product requiring collection of disparate county GIS and assessment data. White said some counties regard parcel or GIS data as proprietary and that the department would face a large data-gathering task across "114 counties and 1 city." He said the sales-and-use tax map currently costs about $3,000,000 a year to maintain and has generated roughly 76,000 views per month.

Dan Hutton of the State Tax Commission said that, as written, the bill does not place levies under the commission's purview and that, if the map required per-property detail, local assessors and small counties could face significant fiscal and administrative burdens. Brandon Alexander of the State Auditor's Office clarified that the auditor's annual certification (the 2025 report) would be the basis for rate data the department might use.

Committee members expressed mixed views about the value of a statewide front-page feature versus the cost and local data limitations. The hearing concluded with no committee vote recorded in the transcript.