ATLANTA, Ga. - A state constitutional amendment that could have cut property taxes for homeowners by 75% or more failed when all but one Democrat voted against it.

Because such amendments in Georgia require a two-thirds vote by legislators, the plan backed by Republican state House Speaker Jon Burns needed at least 21 Democratic votes.

The Georgia bill could be revived.

But House Republicans said they would also begin looking at more limited ways to provide property tax relief that wouldn’t require a constitutional amendment.

Even the plan rejected Tuesday in Georgia was a step back from the original plan to phase out homeowner property taxes by 2032.

Tuesday’s version would have cut, but not necessarily eliminated, property taxes on a primary residence, while encouraging local governments and schools to instead rely on sales taxes to fund operations. It would also have raised taxes on sales of computers to data centers to offset some revenue losses.

State House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Shaw Blackmon said the measure would have provided “dramatic savings for homeowners.”

“We’ve all received emails from constituents worried their skyrocketing property tax will force them from their homes,” he said in a debate on Tuesday.

But state House Democratic Minority Leader Carolyn Hugley called the bill an election-year “exercise in cold, hard politics.”

She and other Democrats said that in many cases, local governments wouldn’t be legally able to raise sales taxes enough to offset the billions in property taxes that would be lost.

“The math’s just not math-ing. It just does not add up,” Hugley said. ”And this is not a responsible thing to do.”

Several other states are looking at shifting from property taxes to sales taxes.

But Thomas Brosy, a senior research associate at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, said eliminating property taxes is “very unlikely to happen.”

“Completely slashing them is really unrealistic, since it really is the largest source of on revenues for most local governments in the United States,” Brosy said.

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