Virginia Removes Confederacy Groups from Tax Exemption Lists

Last month, Virginia enacted legislation (HB167) that struck “the Virginia Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy” from the lists of organizations eligible for exemption from recordation taxes and real and personal property taxes. The same legislation also removed the following additional organizations from the list of entities exempt from real and personal property taxes: the Confederate Memorial Literacy Society; the Stonewall Jackson Memorial, Incorporated; and the General Organization of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The removal of these groups was aided by the fact that they had been specifically granted exemption by legislative designation, thereby making it easy to remove the exemptions by simply deleting them from the list of eligible organizations. If the groups challenge this change in court, presumably on First Amendment grounds as well as any available state law grounds, it will be interesting to see whether they are successful, especially given the state constitution explicitly gives the legislature the right to exempt property from taxation by designation (and so presumably the authority to remove such designation). Coverage: N.Y. Times.