THE GUARDIAN received the following opinion on Urban Renewal from a Moscow, Idaho reader and we are sharing the insights of the reader with you.
Paul,
Thank you very much for your time, effort, and intelligence in exposing URAs as city departments along with the corruption that thereby occurs.
In addition to the arguments already made, here is another consideration:
For those who live in counties where a city has an URA where incremental tax dollars go to the URAs, the out-of-city taxpayers are being taxed without representation.
When a city places participating properties in a URA district on an incremental tax plan, the general tax collected from those properties is frozen based at the initial value of the properties, even for purposes of collecting the county's share of property taxes. Hence, all taxpayers of the county must make up the difference for this lost of revenue that would occur with the incremental value of the subject propertires.
However, the taxpayers who live outside the city with a URA have no control over the city who appoints all the members of the URA board. Thus, out-of-city taxpayers have no recourse what's-so-ever at the polls if they are unhappy with the URA who is in effect taxing them. They cannot vote against the elected city officials who appoint the offending URA board members.
This is taxation without representation.
Thank you again for your efforts. I hope very much that you will be successful.
Wayne A. Fox
Moscow, Idaho
Absolutely correct. Sad that Idahoans will risk (and sacrifice) their lives in places like Iraq so those people can have "democracy", but they fail to understand or protest injustices in their own backyard.
ReplyDeleteWe need some "domestic heroes."