Raise taxes for no reason? Umm … nah.
Well, stop the presses. Asked to vote in favor of higher taxes for no particular purpose … and in the face of a well-funded campaign against such taxes … and no campaign in favor of them … voters in 16 N.C. counties said no. (Well, it’s lovely this week in Carolina, so I’m sure most remembered to say: no, thank you.)
Gee, it’s almost as if the county commissioners in those 16 counties wanted the voters to say no — except in Chatham County, where the commissioners did want a yes vote, but didn’t do much to get it.
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Note, by contrast, what happened in Charlotte, where the 1/2-cent sales tax for transit was on the ballot. A tax for something, iow. Voters said yes to the tax (actually, no to the effort to repeal it) by 70-30 percent.
Excuse me for repeating myself — or repeating Stan Norwalk’s advice as reported in a Citizen column in August — but here’s what Stan the man said back then that the Wake County Commissioners should do with their newly granted authorization from the General Assembly (remember, they can either raise the transfer tax 0.4 percent OR the sales tax 0.5 percent, but only if the voters have approved it first):
I asked Stan Norwalk, vice chair of WakeUP Wake County and the leading local proponent of the transfer tax, what he wants the commissioners to do. Put the question on the ballot with the next school bond, Norwalk said. Tell the voters their property taxes will go up the most if neither option is used, and the least if the transfer tax is chosen. (It raises more money than the sales tax.)
Then the voters decide.
The key part of that statement is, put it on the ballot with a purpose — a school bond issue, a transit plan, something that the voters might want … because they sure aren’t going to want a tax increase in the abstract.
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So what does Stan say now? This just in from him –
Many are asking the question: is the vote yesterday the end of the transfer tax? The results in the referendums around the state are clear. The question remains is how do we pay for schools, for public education, for roads, for water and for the basic infrastructure that makes Wake County and NC an attractive place to live and work. How do we pay for growth and the overwhelming combination of growth plus major inflation in building new infrastructure?
The answer seems more remote than ever. And that should be of concern to the leaders of both business and government across the state. That should be of concern to parents seeking to prepare their children for the challenges that lie ahead. It should concern commuters stuck in traffic jams. It will concern businesses seeking to relocate or grow here. It will concern taxpayers as they face the alternative of steep increases in property tax or cuts in services. It may even concern the leaders of the real estate industry lobby. Have they won a battle only to kill the goose that laid the golden egg?
Of equal concern should be that in Wake and other fast growing counties the voters are saying: slow down the growth. A better answer would have been to allow growth to pay for at least part of the cost of growth and keep our infrastructure up-to-date. But there is no answer as to how to slow growth without slowing job formation.
Some things seem clear. Its a bad idea to ask voters to tax themselves with a new tax they don’t understand. It is even a worse idea to ask them to vote for a new tax when they are highly concerned about their own economic future and their day-to-day costs are rising faster than their incomes.
The $1.5 million the realtors and developers spent this year on defeating the transfer tax was a key factor. Their alliance with anti-government, anti-tax groups, i.e., the John Locke Foundation and Americans for Prosperity helped sow distrust as to how the money will be spent. The lack of a statewide counter to this alliance gave them free rein to promote half-truths and distortions. Had the transfer tax been linked to paying for a school bond there would have been little room to question how the money would be spent.
At the end of the day, the vote in the sixteen counties is obviously a set back. Clearly the voters would have preferred an impact fee. The problems remain. One answer is to learn from this first round of referendums. Another answer is APFO’s, already used by six counties in NC and several states to help infrastructure keeps up with growth. But even more important is for leaders in government and business to step forward to take a more active role in devising and supporting solutions to the problems we all face.