Alaska Disabled Veteran Property Tax Exemption

AS 29.45.030(e) exempts from municipal property tax the first one hundred fifty thousand dollars of assessed value of real property owned and occupied as the primary residence and permanent place of abode by a resident who is a disabled veteran, or who is sixty-five or older, or who is at least sixty and the widow or widower of a person who qualified on one of those two grounds. A disabled veteran here is a person whose disability is rated as fifty percent or more. The rating may come from VA or from the branch of service in which the person served, which is wider than most states allow and reaches a chapter 61 medical retiree who never filed a VA claim. No permanence finding is required and no wartime service is required. The exemption is mandatory, and that word carries weight in Alaska. Every municipality that levies a property tax must grant it. A municipality cannot vote it down, cannot cap it below $150,000, and cannot condition it on need. What a municipality may do is add to it, under the optional exemptions in AS 29.45.050, and several boroughs do. Then the part that a veteran should know before assuming the benefit is secure. AS 29.45.030(g) requires the state to reimburse a borough or city for the real property tax revenue lost by the operation of subsection (e). The legislature has not funded that reimbursement since 1997. The Alaska Municipal League, which has passed a resolution on it, puts the cost now carried locally at over $103 million a year across the eighteen municipalities that levy a property tax. The exemption is real and enforceable; the promise to pay for it is a line in a statute that has gone unappropriated for nearly three decades, and it is why the exemption comes under legislative pressure in most budget years. The second thing to check is whether there is any property tax to exempt. Most of Alaska is unorganized borough with no property tax at all. The exemption operates in eighteen municipalities. For a veteran outside them this entry is worth nothing, which is not true of the property tax entry in any other state in this catalog. Boroughs commonly require, as a condition of the exemption, that the applicant be eligible for a Permanent Fund Dividend. That is the residency proxy Alaska uses, and it means the PFD rules about absences decide the property tax exemption too for a service member stationed outside the state. Deadlines are local. AS 29.45.030 directs each municipality to establish procedures and deadlines by ordinance, and the governing body may waive a late filing for good cause shown. The dates differ: Ketchikan Gateway Borough, for instance, sets March 31 for the senior exemption and July 1 for the veteran exemption. There is no statewide date and a veteran who assumes one will miss it somewhere. Documentation is usually a current VA rating decision or benefit summary letter, and several boroughs require it to be less than twelve months old even though the rating itself is not time limited.