Beaufort County lawmakers have proposed legislation that would allow County Council to reject last year's property reassessment and use values from previous years to calculate property taxes.

Beaufort was one of several South Carolina counties to conduct a countywide property reassessment last year. In many counties, especially along the coast, landowners are finding that their property values have doubled and tripled.

The legislation would apply only to counties that conducted reassessments last year. It would allow each county's council to vote to throw out the 2004 reassessment and use the 2003 property values.

Rep. Bill Herbkersman, the bill's lead sponsor, said the move was intended to keep people from being taxed off their land. It's supposed to be a stopgap measure until the General Assembly passes major changes in the law governing reassessment, he said.

But the bill still requires that a property be taxed for any improvements made during 2004. That means if a county rejects the 2004 reassessment, it then would have to calculate the value of property improvements made during the past year and add it to each property's 2003 value.

The county and every government that receives money from property taxes -- including municipalities, school districts, fire districts and public service districts -- also would have to calculate a new tax rate based on the previous property values.

"The main thing of this is to not force the county or the municipalities of Beaufort County into a (tax rate) rollback that would damage their budgets right now," said Herbkersman, R-Bluffton. "But at the same time, it gives relief to those folks that are, as we are speaking, right now losing their houses."

Beaufort County Council Chairman Weston Newton said the legislation would raise a number of logistical concerns, including whether people who already have paid taxes would be owed a partial refund.

If the legislation passes and the county chooses to reject the 2004 reassessment, it could have wide-ranging effects, from altering property tax rates to affecting governments' borrowing ability.

By law, local governments, including the school district, only can borrow up to 8 percent of their tax base. If the county reverted to a previous year's tax base, it would reduce that amount drastically.

But Newton noted that the reassessment "has had some detrimental effects" and County Council has encouraged state lawmakers to reform the property tax system.

The legislation, co-sponsored by Republican Reps. Richard Chalk of Hilton Head Island and Catherine Ceips of Beaufort, is awaiting action from the House Ways and Means Committee. It requires approval from the House, Senate and Gov. Mark Sanford before it takes effect.

State law requires counties to reassess property every five years, with the option of a one-year delay. Last year, lawmakers approved a bill that would have capped increases in a property's taxable value at 20 percent, but the governor vetoed the legislation last month.

Several bills have been filed this year that would overhaul the state's reassessment law. Chalk said he plans to file a bill that would cap increases in actual tax payments on a given property at 15 percent.

Herbkersman is supporting legislation that would impose a system known as point-of-sale reassessment, where a property's taxable value changes only when it is sold. But Chalk said a point-of-sale reassessment wouldn't help Beaufort County taxpayers since it would not affect the 2004 reassessment.

Newton said point-of-sale reassessment would be a good idea in "an area like ours where there are a number of properties turning over and changing hands" because it allows longtime landowners to pay predictable property tax bills. But, he noted, "the devil's in the details in the mechanics of how you would make that work."