COLUMN RIGHT : If Prop. 13 Gets Changed, Back to Basics : Rather than make things worse, the state might consider ending the property tax.

Although the R. H. Macy Co. lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 13 has succumbed to a grinding bombardment of angry phone calls and cut-up credit cards, two other lawsuits arguing that Proposition 13 violates the equal-protection clause of the U.S. Constitution are making their way to the nation’s highest court.

Because the court has expressed an interest in challenges to Proposition 13, the justices are likely to consider the matter sooner or later.

So as Proposition 13 passed its 13th birthday June 6, some in California were making plans to replace it.

But it won’t be easy to develop a plan that can be sold to a voting public that has come to expect a simple, predictable property-tax system.

One proposal was made public today by a divided state Senate commission organized more than a year ago to study property-tax equity.

That plan relies on the two most-often-discussed “remedies” to fix Proposition 13: a split tax roll separating commercial and residential property, and a reassessment of residential property to full market value with a floating tax rate below the current 1%, which would produce no more revenue than collected now from homeowners.

The split-roll system would place an even greater burden on income-producing property, which already shoulders two-thirds of the property taxes collected in California. The split roll may be the last straw for many businesses as they weigh the excessive cost of doing business in California against the siren song of out-of-state business recruiters.

A higher commercial-property tax will be a tremendous obstacle to small businesses, which often operate on a small profit margin and cannot easily absorb the tax or pass it on to customers.

The plan dealing with homeowners is even more disturbing. The floating tax rate and reassessment to full-market value means that longtime homeowners would pay more taxes and newer homeowners, less.

The protection of Proposition 13’s inflation cap would be removed for all and, once again, property taxpayers would be at the mercy of an out-of-control real-estate market. There would be no reasonable relationship between ability to pay and a property tax based on home value.

Increasing the taxes on longtime homeowners could place homeownership in jeopardy for people on low or fixed incomes. The solution, we are told, is to let these people live in the house until they die, with the government recovering past-due tax revenue upon the sale of the home.

It is a heartless state that would deprive citizens who have lived in, improved and paid taxes on their homes for years to be denied the pleasure of leaving them to their children or using their equity for retirement or health emergencies.

As news spread of this threat to Proposition 13, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. was inundated with calls from senior citizens asking whether they should sell their homes now--before taxes go up and they lose them to the tax man.

Proposition 13 was the late Howard Jarvis’ fourth attempt to change California’s property tax. His first effort, eliminating the property tax, will be reconsidered in light of the court challenges. However, this would seem to be a political impossibility because of the need to impose a replacement tax, probably on income or consumption.

Yet, looked at in the context of the history of property taxes, it may not be hopeless.

Property taxes originally were a good test of people’s wealth before the advent of intangible property that evaded the tax collector, such as stocks and bonds. Farmers, whose land was readily available for the tax collector to assess, started the movement toward income and other taxes to ease the burden of property taxes.

Proposition 13 also eased the burden of property taxes by reflecting an ability to pay the taxes at the time property was purchased. In retrospect, Proposition 13 may be just a step toward the demise of this archaic property-tax system.

If the court decides against Proposition 13, the property-tax law will fall back into the chaos of the political arena, where best-laid plans have met uncertain fates before.