If you live in St. Tammany Parish and haven’t gotten an email in the last month asking you to sign a petition to raise the homestead exemption… well… then you probably haven’t checked your email.

For weeks, an online petition has been circulating with a promise that at 5,000 signatures it will be forwarded to every member of the Legislature. The goal of the petition is to raise the Homestead Exemption – long set at $75,000 – to more than double that amount, a step that would require a constitutional amendment and that would result in no small amount of angst for local taxing authorities. It’s also not all it’s cracked up to be.