Wednesday, February 28, 2001

Local expert resolves mysteries of tax inequity issue. This is a headline no one will ever see anywhere, because an expert has been defined as a guy with a suit and a briefcase who is at least 25 miles away from home. I'm already home, in Fayette County, so I, and many others, don't have a prayer of being considered an expert on anything in this county.

Informed readers of The Citizen know that the county and cities paid an "expert" good taxpayer money to have a study made of what tax inequities might be found between the county and cities. One citizen was even moved, last week, to write (in The Citizen) about a "distinguished outside third party consultant," otherwise unidentified, who clued in Peachtree City Mayor Lenox about the inequities his flock allegedly had to endure.

Mayor Lenox wrote a letter to PTC citizens and arranged to put it on the city website, and the world at large was invited to go look at his letter in a short announcement in the AJC of Feb. 15. Along with the letter, one could click open two spreadsheets purporting to display the revenue PTC contributes to the county, and the value of what it gets back.

There are five revenue items and 25 items of county expenditures. I downloaded and printed these figures, and proceeded to study them one by one to see whether the mayor was right. (Like President Reagan, I believe in "trust but verify.") I doubt that many of those who got on the mayor's tax inequity bandwagon had the patience to do that.

In the process I discovered the techniques that can help create the impression of a tax inequity. Basically, there are only two.

(1) Suppose you have a city like PTC which happens to have a tax digest of 39 percent of the county's but a population which is 35 percent of the county's. By claiming that all county services are distributed in proportion to population, not to tax digest, you can claim an inequity equal to 4 percent (39 minus 35) of the whole county budget. To disguise what you're doing, you wade through numerous items one by one without announcing your approach (making an occasional concession).

(2) With respect to any service which the county provides but which the city supplements, you claim that since the city provides a service with the same name, its residents "obviously" get nothing out of the service provided by the county: clear examples are items like roads, library, recreation, planning, and law enforcement. Thus you plug in a value of zero for that county service for city residents.

That's essentially how the tax inequity figures, as presented by Mayor Lenox, were developed.

That approach is basically wrong, and it finds no support in Georgia law. The county has nearly tons of documents to prove that former County Finance Director Emory McHugh patiently considered these issues item by item and showed Mayor Lenox how there was no tax inequity. The county commissioners were made aware of all this.

It is totally unfair to paint the county commissioners as indifferent to Fayette County citizens who live in the cities, or as favoring residents of the unincorporated area. After all, of the five commissioners, three do live in cities.

The world can be divided into two classes of people. There are those who are frustratingly patient and who dig into all the esoteric accounting stuff involved in coming to a proper, scientific conclusion. Those who do will find the mayor's conclusion in error. Pure and simple. Very few people can afford to do that, and there's no shame in not doing it so long as you don't hop blindly onto his tax inequity bandwagon.

I have no idea who the "distinguished outside third party consultant" is. I don't know what makes him so distinguished. Now that the secrets of finding tax inequities have been revealed to you, you yourself may want to go into other counties, where you'll be received as a distinguished outside third party consultant, and earn yourself a good fee at their citizens' expense, dredging up alleged tax inequities.

Meanwhile, somebody ought to tell our elected officials, here, to be a bit more circumspect about the use of outside consultants and experts. Former County Finance Director Emory McHugh is more of an expert on this tax inequity issue than anybody from the outside, and there is nothing that can demoralize a good public servant more than this stubborn willingness some people have to always believe the guy from out of town.

If enough citizens show an interest, I'll be glad to arrange to provide a two-hour lecture in some public place somewhere showing why PTC citizens are not the victims of tax inequity in relation to Fayette County. I'll do it free. I do have a suit and a briefcase, but remember, I'm not from out of town.

Claude Y. Paquin

Fayette County

cypaquin@msn.com

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