The Allen County Commissioners met with members of the Allen County Council yesterday afternoon to begin discussions of an Allen County legislative agenda for the 2007 session of the Indiana General Assembly.
Commissioners F. Nelson Peters and Linda Bloom met with Council members Darren Vogt, Cal Miller, Roy Buskirk and Paul Moss. County Auditor Lisa Blosser and Chief Deputy Auditor Tera Klutz were the other county officials attending. Fort Wayne Common Council member Tom Smith was in the audience for most of the meeting.
One of the items discussed was the effect of the new "Circuit Breaker" legislation to limit the overall property tax levy for tax payers. Ms. Blosser and Mrs. Klutz explained the possible effects of the Circuit Breaker statute in limiting Allen County revenue starting in 2008.
I took the opportunity to urge the County Council to consider reinstatement of the Allen County Tax Adjustement Board. This was met with encouragement from the officials present. The Council Members indicated that they would like me to make a presentation before the full Council at a regular meeting in the near future.
This is very enouraging. I apologize that other obligations prevent me from writing a longer post today.
However, I would direct you to my previous weblog post from last autumn on the reestablishment of a Tax Adjustment Board. From my earlier post:
We used to have [a Tax Adjustment Board] in Allen County. It was the last stop before the proposed property tax rates got sent to the State Board of Tax Commissioners (now the Indiana Department of Local Government Finance). The Board had the power to cut tax levies, it did not have the power to cut individual budget items.
The TAB looked at the OVERALL tax burden on any given piece of taxable real property. That is, it looked at the "stacked plates" of the township, school corporation, city, county, library, airport authority, and, potentially, the fire district, the parks and so on.
Right now, no entity performs that function. The Tax Adjustment Board made the true economic decision that the individual local taxing units often will not. Economics is defined as the "allocation of scarce resources." Many local governmental leaders do not believe that tax resources are scarce. Or if they are, it is due to the profligracy of the other tax bodies in their community.
Council member Roy Buskirk did offer some concern that limitation on the levy would affect the proportion in which local option income taxes would be distributed to local units.
Photo of F. Nelson Peters at the August 31 meeting by Mitch Harper.
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