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No Comments [ Add Comment ]Lipstick on a pig
If you're like us, it's not uncommon to find yourself approving the result of a governmental action, but detesting the way it got done.
The latest example of this was the way the Legislature re-imposed the 0.05 percent sales tax on unprepared food -- the grocery tax -- to fund Utah Transit Authority operations in Davis and Weber counties. The tax hike was scooted through by lawmakers on the last day of the recent legislative session, tucked away in Senate Bill 245, which began the session with the title "Funding Relating to Airports," but ended with "Funding Relating to Airports, Highways, and Public Transit."
During the Legislature's 2007 session, the sales tax on groceries was reduced. But since portions of the sales tax fund UTA operations in Box Elder, Weber, Davis, Salt Lake and Utah counties, UTA stood to lose funding. So lawmakers built into the tax-cut legislation a provision allowing the counties' respective county councils and/or commissions the option to increase 0.05 percent of the sales tax to make UTA whole again. Utah, Salt Lake and Box Elder counties quickly hiked the tax. Only Davis and Weber counties balked, and had been negotiating with UTA over the transit agency's budgets and potential service cutbacks for months.
The two counties' commissions were not looking forward to increasing sales taxes -- even by 5 cents per $100 spent, and especially not in an election year -- so that's why you don't see them pitching fits over the Legislature swooping in to raise the tax on their behalf. They say they weren't involved in the negotiations between lawmakers and the UTA to restore the tax, and explain that the state took the decision away from them.
So it did.
Still, as we've said before in this space, we've believed all along the UTA revenue should have been restored. We don't like it when the Legislature pulls a stunt like it did in 2007: taking credit for reducing taxes, but doing it in such a way that it forces counties to raise taxes to make up the difference. That stinks.
Over time, we actually came to admire Weber and Davis counties' insistence on reviewing UTA's budgets before commissioners decided whether to raise the tax. UTA asked for trouble when it became immediately belligerent, threatening to curtail paratransit and commuter rail service in the counties if the commissioners didn't restore the taxes. It was a textbook case of a bureaucratic knee-jerk reaction -- picking a fight when it didn't need to.
Now the matter is settled: UTA will get its money, the county commissioners have washed their hands of the sales tax increase and lawmakers paint it as simply correcting their 2007 oversight. It's a tidy conclusion, but getting there was a mess.
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