Why, with reserves of $5 million or so, don’t Allen County commissioners lower the county’s tax levy?
They’d love to, Commissioner Tom Williams told the Register Monday, but are locked into budget authority (projected expenditures) to avoid becoming a victim of the Legislature’s befuddling decision to impose a tax-dollar lid on local budgets.
Same is true of city governing bodies, and to a lesser degree school districts, which have operated at the Legislature’s fiscal behest since the early 1990s.
Allen County is a clear example of what is wrong with the law, which took effect a year ago and put local governors between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
County commissioners could slash the ad valorem tax levy by many mills, but in so doing very likely would have themselves facing innumerable machinations in years to come.
Why, you ask? Because legislators, while not able to handle the state’s finances in much of a satisfactory way, thought it appropriate to tell local folks how to collect, and consequently spend, local tax dollars. Talk about arrogance.
The lid is determined by the consumer price index (commonly referred to as inflation) for upcoming years. Thus, if the CPI is judged to be 1.4 percent, as it was this year, a council or commission may increase the amount of tax dollars collected only by that amount. If any body wants to raise more, for any worthwhile project, recourse is a referendum.
That creates an unwarranted interruption of the local process, because an election has to be before the coming year’s budget may be approved and put in place. With regulations being what they, an election can be scheduled but if the decision to do so comes late in budget preparation, it is difficult to accomplish.
So, to get around all the debilitating rigmarole created by the Legislature — and signed into law without hesitation by Gov. Sam Brownback — most local governing bodies opt to budget the maximum allowable to avoid any last minute problems, in the current year and those ahead.
The law does have some exceptions — emergency medical services, money raised because of increased property valuation and to deal with library needs, indicating perhaps legislators are more literate than they sometimes seem.
To his credit, and likely in part because of his years of serving as an Allen County commissioner, our representative, Kent Thompson, voted against the tax-dollar lid.
We assume the Kansas Association of Counties and League of Kansas Municipalities are leading the charge to have the tax lid law repealed. The vast majority of council and commission members also are of that opinion.
REASON to abrogate the law is simple.
Town council members, as well as county commissioners Williams, Jim Talkington and Jerry Daniels, know much better what is needed within their districts than someone in western Kansas or the rich suburbs of Kansas City, perched and protected in either chamber of the Legislature.
