Suburbs and Taxes

Looks like the Twin Cities suburbs are getting their tax increases after all:

"Two years ago, after a state budget crunch squeezed the finances of many local communities, city officials warned that a wave of rising fees would follow.

They weren't kidding.

A deluge of charges -- from 'cul-de-sac fees' to 'swimming-pool fees' -- has tensions building in the suburbs, especially fast-growing areas.


There are growing complaints that cities are taking advantage of their leverage over developers in an era of increasing citizen resistance to growth to impose an unprecedented array of charges.

...Some say it's about time that the people responsible for low-density urban sprawl paid a greater share of the costs. And they note that there is some poetic justice in that many of the sharpest fee increases have been imposed in the same zones of suburbia that elected legislators against raising taxes.

'All this stacking on of fees,' University of Minnesota sprawl expert John Adams said, 'is nothing more a desperate act to raise revenues in the face of state aid drying up. And the people who voted for 'no new taxes' are the same ones now bellying up to pay these fees.'"

The thing that they don't point out is that, while they may not like the new fees, the fees they're being forced to pay now are going to suburbanites and suburbanites alone. They lobbied to cut taxes, and therefore state revenue, for everyone all across the state and now everybody's feeling the crunch as a result. Now, however, instead of wealthy suburbanites raising state taxes that will help everyone in the state, they're going to pay local fees that only benefit themselves and leave the problems they helped cause in other areas for others to deal with, which is exactly what they're whole anti-tax push was about in the first place: selfishness.

We had a situation similar to this during the 2002 election in suburban Johnson County, Kansas, where I lived at the time. All the suburbanites had voted for tax-cutting state legislators and refused to pay state taxes that would help spread some of the prosperity from the wealthy suburbs to the poorer small towns in the state. Then, in 2002, residents of conservative Johnson County voted overwhelmingly in favor of a local tax hike to help fund their schools. At the time, many of my Republican friends and family couldn't understand why the rest of the state had a problem with them doing this. From their perspective, they were just investing in making their children's schools better. The key, however, is who the "they" in "their children" refers to in this statement.