Proposal To Eliminate the Motor Vehicle Tax
Governor Rell has made a proposal to eliminate the Motor Vehicle property tax. As a conservative, my instant reaction was “Fantastic!” Any time the citizens are left with more of the money they earned, and any time a government as chock full of social engineers as our state government is has less money to experiment with, the better off we all are. The fact that it’s being offset by the elimination of the property tax credit for our income tax is a bit of a disappointment, but any time a government official even contemplates a tax reduction in a true blue state like ours, it is cause for optimism.

The other part of the proposal is to make up for the loss in revenue to the towns by increasing the amount of money to be received from the ever-increasing pile of bucks being sent annually to Hartford from the state’s two casinos. As soon as I read that, my heart sank because, as will be illustrated below, the state legislature has a deplorable record of shortchanging municipalities when it comes to divvying up the slot machine money.

Let me digress for a second and mention that I received a letter from a constituent who made the same point I am going to make. I kept the letter for a long time, and, actually, I thought I still had it but, apparently, in an effort to reduce my office from a state of chaos down to mere disorder, this letter got misplaced. If that person were to read this, I would appreciate hearing from him again so that I might give him the recognition he is due.

I believe that Ted Moynihan also alluded to this point in one of his weekly columns in the R-J. The fact that he and I share the same opinion is a rare occurrence indeed, and I hope that fact lends some credence to my remarks to at least a few that would otherwise dimiss them as coming from some crank.

Okay, let me continue by showing you, in cold hard numbers, just what I mean. All of these figures were taken from the Annual Budgets of the Town of Wallingford.

In the fiscal year ending June 30, 1995, we received $415,159 as our share of the Pequot Funds (as it is entitled in the Annual Budget). This represented .51% (i.e., one half of one percent) of the $81,601,270 in total revenue received that year. Five years later, this share had increased to $602,542, which represented .60% of the total $99,847,036 in revenue. This was the high point of the revenue sharing. Ever since then, it has raced downward, so that in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2005, the town's share was only $320,136, which was .27% of the $120,287,340 revenue for that year. Or put another way, the money that the state so generously allots the Town of Wallingford has been cut in half in the last five years, and its impact on our budget has been reduced by even more than that. And we are reduced to begging to keep even this share. And you and I both know that this slide is not been because the state receives less from those two gigantic cash registers in eastern Connecticut.

Now, I really believe that, as of this moment, as proposed, lawmakers in Hartford that support this proposal really and truly do mean to stick to the agreement to make up all the lost revenue. Unfortunately, they are almost all Republicans and, at this point in time, they have little control over the outcome.

But the history is right there, and it ain’t pretty. [Note to Ted Moynihan: this is a colloquialism, okay?] The towns start out getting their promised share, but, over time, that share gets smaller and smaller and smaller – because our benevolent state legislature finds more and more and more ways to spend it in Hartford rather than pass it on through to the cities and towns.

So watch where this goes. If our representatives are really serious about this proposal, they will craft legislation that locks in – locks in – full reimbursement to the towns of an amount equivalent to that of the motor vehicle property tax plus the present level of casino revenue sharing.

If the bill that is finally passed does not contain these ironclad obligations, then you can look at this as nothing more than yet another transfer of power from the local level to the state level. And you and I, the poor zshlubs that pay all these taxes, will have been bamboozled once again, and will have lost just that much more control over how our government spends our money.
- posted by Steve Knight @ Saturday, April 22, 2006