Wednesday, December 20, 2000

As Fayette County residents, we all pay the 1 percent local option sales tax. That money does not disappear into a giant dark hole: except for about 1.5 percent of it which the state and the merchants keep, it reappears as income to the county government (which receives 47.5 percent), Peachtree City (35.64 percent), Fayetteville (11.36 percent), Tyrone (4.91 percent), and Brooks (0.59 percent). This is fact, not fiction.

If it is the indelicate four-letter word with which the Peachtree City mayor is reported to have described it, then for the governments that receive the money, it has all the beneficial virtues of good fertilizer.

What the Peachtree City mayor had in mind, it seems, was the showing of the local sales tax as a credit on our property tax bills. That, I must admit, is a bit of showmanship. There is no real necessity for showing it, but it is informative and thus useful to see. It is definitely more helpful than these pictures of smiling politicians returning our tax money by delivering giant-sized checks from the state to local organizations, which we occasionally find in our newspapers. That's a more smelly kind of fertilizer.

The Peachtree City mayor is entitled to his opinion about the practice of showing the county and cities' income from the local option sales tax as a deduction on property tax bills. But it remains a fact, undisputable, that the county and cities can (and do) charge less property tax because they receive some local sales tax.

The problem, Mr. Mayor, is that the cities receive about 50 percent more sales tax than their citizens contribute, and the 45,250 residents of the unincorporated part of the county receive only 47.5 percent of what they contribute. Talk about tax inequity!

I will let you in on a dirty little secret because there is, in fact, more to it than that. A lot of businesses, in this county, including large land-owning developers, pay virtually no sales tax. The main reason they don't pay sales tax is that they don't buy anything, or hardly anything, unlike people who have to buy cars for transportation, as well as clothing and food for daily survival.

One large land developer, so I have been told (without personally verifying it yet), gets the benefit of a $318,000 property tax reduction from the local option sales tax. Just think of all the retail stores, grocery stores, convenience stores, drug stores, banks, offices, industrial plants and other businesses that get so-called property tax relief out of our sales tax, eating up a good 25 percent of it, while managing to pay very little of it.

The people, even the poorest among us, do, in fact, end up subsidizing businesses. That's the Robin Hood principle in reverse: take from the poor, give to the rich!

It's time the people opened their eyes, not just their wallets. If the county commission ever screws up enough courage to call a referendum to repeal our local option sales tax, as was suggested in last week's Citizen, we should welcome that opportunity warmly. That's an idea worth cultivating, and fertilizing.

Claude Y. Paquin

Fayette County

cypaquin@msn.com

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