EDITORIAL: Half-cent sales tax—why not just enact big increases in city and county property taxes?
By Bill Settlemyer
Executive Publisher
Round three of the effort to pass the Charleston County half-cent sales tax is coming up this fall. But why not just enact big increases in city and county property taxes instead? Why not let the residents of Mount Pleasant cough up $30 million in additional property taxes if they need to solve traffic woes in their city? Why not do the same in North Charleston or West Ashley?
Why not? I can think of three good reasons, for starters.
Reason No. 1: If individual municipalities (or the county, for that matter) took the property tax route, homeowners would riot. If voters think paying a half-cent more on their purchases is a bad thing, just try boosting property taxes by 20-30% and see what happens.
Reason No. 2: Visitors to the region will pay a significant share of the revenue raised by the half-cent sales tax. In effect, local taxpayers will get a discount as compared to raising the same amount of funds from property taxes. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to grasp this concept—how many different ways are there to say, “This will cost you less?”
Reason No. 3: If the citizens and political and civic leaders in Charleston County blunder their way through a third and probably final failed effort to enact the half-cent tax, the consequences will become starkly evident: Fewer dollars for parks and land conservation, intolerable traffic jams and the likely end of mass transit in the region.
We’ll probably see less emphasis on mass transit in the upcoming campaign for the sales tax. Unfortunately, some Charleston County voters seem to think the transit system is used exclusively by poor people and feel they should just walk to work or maybe just not work and go on welfare. Same for the handicapped, the elderly, the college students and business professionals who find parking in downtown Charleston to be prohibitive and prefer to ride the bus—let the bums hitchhike, for gosh sakes! We should be bigger and better than that as a community.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t insist on innovation and creative thinking so we can make the best of mass transit in a region that doesn’t have a real “center city” to serve as an efficient mass transit hub. We should insist that the CARTA board and staff scour the country for “best practices” in communities similar to ours and apply those standards here. But that’s where the combination of citizen participation and responsible government comes in. It’s how communities work—or don’t work. Freedom isn’t free and neither is good government.
“Trust but verify”
As the run-up begins to the fall elections, we’ll keep hearing demands for detailed commitments by County Council as to how money collected over 25 years will be spent, putting council members in a seemingly untenable dilemma.
There’s a lot of research that says civic trust is a key indicator of whether a region will prosper economically. If we are unwilling to have some reasonable level of trust among city and county governments, interest groups and the public at large, we condemn ourselves to a state of political gridlock that stands in the way of needed projects and policies that broadly benefit Charleston County and the entire region.
The best idea I’ve heard for addressing the trust issue is the implementation of a County Council ordinance that defines the process of community review for future spending decisions, one that formally brings in city governments, environmental groups, developers and neighborhood and civic groups. The process would insure that the decision-making is carried out in an open setting with opportunities for both discussion and negotiation as the funding allocations are planned and implemented.
In other words, to borrow a phrase from Ronald Reagan, “trust but verify.” If it worked for nuclear disarmament, it should work for spending decisions in Charleston County.
No, the idea isn’t perfect, but that’s just not the nature of government. A review process laid out in advance by county ordinance will raise the confidence level that sales tax money will be fairly and wisely spent.
No feet left!
This is the third try on the half-cent sales tax. As a community, we’ve shot ourselves in the left foot, then the right. If my math is correct, we’re out of feet. Environmental groups might successfully kill the tax for the third time thinking they have slowed development, but in all probability they will have also killed mass transit and drastically curtailed future spending on parks and land conservation.
Mount Pleasant voters might feel good about killing a proposal that didn’t guarantee them every nickel they wanted for roadwork in their city, but they might feel bad for a long time about giving themselves the choice of sitting in traffic jams on unimproved roads or swallowing the burden of dramatic property tax increases to fund roadway improvements.
Yes, everybody would feel good, temporarily, about defeating the sales tax to show that no one can mess with their particular interests. The hangover (and the headaches) would begin when everyone finally realized that the public interest and the best outcome for their individual interests went down the tubes along with the referendum.
I know this is a novel idea, but for once let’s do it right and get this important piece of civic business done so we can move on to other challenges and opportunities.
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