Wednesday, September 11, 2002

Our Georgia law concerning the local option sales tax (LOST) gives our county commissioners three choices: they can cheat, they can lie, or they can drop the tax altogether.

A front-page article in The Citizen for Aug. 28 explained how a proposed new LOST distribution plan would give city residents tax credits of between $482 and $643, while unincorporated residents would get $178. That's cheating. And on a pretty large scale, too. The article presents figures showing how the current plan cheats the unincorporated residents even more.

All Fayette County citizens deserve equal credit for the local sales tax. If each city gets a cut of the sales tax in proportion to its population, then what the county gets should be used strictly for the benefit of the unincorporated area residents. That would be fair.

This is where the lying comes in. Our state law requires the county to show, on its tax bills, that the county share of the local sales tax reduced every county property owner's tax bill, no matter whether the property is in a city or not. Even if the county spends its entire share of the local sales tax for the exclusive benefit of unincorporated residents, it still must show a tax credit as if it had used its share of the sales tax for the benefit of all residents. That's the lying part. Doubting Thomases can check this out at section 48-8-91 of the Georgia Code.

If you don't use the tax for the exclusive benefit of unincorporated residents, you cheat them. If you use the tax for their exclusive benefit, you're being fair to unincorporated residents but you lie on all the tax bills you send out. You tell city residents they received a credit from a tax that brought them no benefit, and you tell non-city residents they received a much smaller credit than they actually got. What you see is not what you get. In legal circles, that's often considered fraud.

That's the choice our commissioners have, and everybody is getting confused because the law requires them to lie if they do what's right.

The third solution is to drop the tax altogether. Like Cadillac-driving welfare queens, our cities have become addicted to the sales tax and don't want their welfare payments cut. Anybody cut off easy welfare hollers, and city officials are no exception.

It is unfortunate our county commissioners were put in the position they're in. We should not have state laws which require local officials to lie on tax bills, but we have one here.

Our state legislators like to entertain Little Miss Watermelon and to pass laws making grits the official prepared food of Georgia. If they got serious about passing decent laws instead, we wouldn't have the city-county confrontations which now drain us of the goodwill essential to civic progress, and of the tax funds that go to lawyers, accountants and consultants who wallow in their legislative slop.

Meanwhile we must remember that there are four sets of mayors and council members tugging at the sleeves and purse strings of our county commissioners, while the residents of the unincorporated area have no one to speak for them but the commissioners themselves. With four of these commissioners living in cities, there is only one, A.G. VanLandingham, who can be said to be in the same boat as the unincorporated residents, and it is not clear he understands the situation.

Of course few people do, which is how people are flimflammed and inequities are perpetuated.

Claude Y. Paquin

Fayetteville

cypaquin@msn.com

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