How One Member Changed Kentucky's Tax Law

Jackson Arnold grew up in Louisville dreaming of moving somewhere bigger. When family circumstances brought him back home shortly after college, he was disappointed; the life he’d imagined seemed to require him to leave. Then, about a month before he graduated, Abundance Network connected him with a local representative in his city, Louisville Metro Councilman Ben Reno-Weber. What started as a civic introduction became something Jackson hadn’t expected: a real opportunity to build the kind of city he’d always wanted to live in.

The problem he and Ben set out to solve was hiding in plain sight. Louisville had too much vacant land, and the tax system was making it worse. Surface parking lots dominated downtown. Vacant and abandoned properties sat idle in historically redlined neighborhoods on the city’s west side. The owners of those properties faced almost no financial pressure to sell or develop, because sitting on land in areas where the city had been investing heavily meant capturing future appreciation without doing anything at all. The less you built, the less you paid. Jackson wanted to change that. He just needed to figure out how.

Before recommending a concrete course of action, Jackson spent six months interviewing community members, real estate experts, city leadership, and civil servants. He analyzed the issue from all perspectives, leveraging introductions from Louisville Metro Councilman Ben Reno-Weber, an Elected Member he met through the Abundance Network. Ultimately, he devised a strategic intervention: a split-rate land value tax designed to shift the tax burden from buildings to the land itself, thereby disincentivizing landowners from keeping property vacant while lowering the cost of new construction.

The problem was that the policy was illegal in Kentucky. So Jackson built a model of Louisville’s property tax system, worked through the state constitution and local ordinance to determine exactly what was legally permissible, and identified the state-level action required to enable it in Louisville. When he eventually walked into rooms with elected officials, he wasn’t asking them to take a leap of faith. He was showing them the data. Including modeling that demonstrated 80% of single-family homeowners would see their property taxes decrease.

Getting the legislation passed required a new bipartisan coalition. To establish a new bipartisan coalition, Jackson and Ben engaged Democratic Councilman Andrew Owen, who had independently come to support a land value tax. They then focused on building a strong connection with Councilman Anthony Piagentini, the leader of the Republican minority caucus. The pitch that brought him on board wasn’t ideological. Piagentini’s exurban constituents were frustrated by suburban sprawl and wanted more downtown development, which the Democrats wanted too. Jackson framed the split-rate tax as the tool to make that happen.

With Piagentini on board, Jackson drafted legislative language to enable the policy within Louisville’s Urban Services District, a historic part of the inner city. The provision was added to a Republican omnibus bill already moving through the legislature. It passed both chambers, the governor vetoed it, and the Republican supermajority overrode the veto on April 14, 2026. Six months after Jackson identified the opening, split-rate taxation was legal in Louisville’s urban core.

Jackson joined Abundance Network in 2025, where his connection to Ben Reno-Weber through the network became the foundation for the coalition that changed Kentucky law.