Editor,
On Nov. 20th, Carbon County held a hearing on a proposed substantial increase in the property tax. There was an overflow crowd with people standing in the hallways. The general feeling was of irritation and anger. I did not envy the three men sitting in the commissioner seats that evening.
They are saddled with the difficult challenge of trying to continue delivering the county services we are accustomed to with rising costs and diminishing revenue. One person at the hearing stated that we need to look seriously at what is the appropriate function of government and eliminate things that are not. I agree. I think we have got to accept that we cannot expect the same level of county services in the future.
A big part of the problem that precipitated the anger that night was a consequence of the only means the state government grants to counties to levy taxes: the property tax. Property tax is an abomination. A fundamental tenet of a free society is the right to own and control property. Property tax is a mockery of that principle. The idea of private ownership becomes a delusion, a joke. We must buy our right to own property. Our “right” to own property is contingent on our paying an annual fee to the government. If a person is unable to pay that fee, their “right” to own property is taken away; the government confiscates their property. Never mind that the person may have had to sacrifice and scrimp for years to buy their home, and now in their older years no longer have the means to pay the ever increasing fee, the government now claims it as theirs. This is outrageous. That is the kind of antics we would expect in despotic, totalitarian governments. The only possible justification for government confiscation of private property is if it were being used for criminal activity.
In addition to being unethical, it is impossible to make property tax equitable. Because of what the property tax is based on, there can be no consideration for a person’s ability to pay. There is no allowance for a person becoming unemployed or disabled or retired. A person’s income may decline, but property tax does not and consumes an even greater percentage of the person’s already strained resources. For a well to do person, property tax cuts into their abundance, for the low income person it takes their very living. On the other hand, with equitable taxing methods such as the sales tax the amount a person pays in taxes is directly proportional to their buying power. There were elderly, fixed income people at the meeting who testified that with this tax increase they would literally be taxed out of their home and on to the street. This is completely unjustified. It is disgraceful that persons in a free society should live in fear losing the roof over their heads to government confiscation.
The amount of property we have the “right” to own is based on how big of a fee we can pay to the government. The fee we must pay for our “right” is set by the opinion of the assessor’s office who regularly set the value of our property higher than we could possibly get on the open market. I know, for example, a person who had a lot in the mountains. To make it more pleasant and useful for his family he decided to build a small cabin on it which amounted to little more than a shed. The property tax people decided that this meant that he was rich and jacked up his property tax so high that it was comparable to what he was paying for his primary residence. He ultimately had to sell it because he couldn’t afford to buy the “right” to own that property.
Property tax discourages persons from making improvements on their property. It encourages persons to make their improvements covertly without obtaining building permits in an effort to keep it from coming to the knowledge of the assessor.
As much as we all hate income tax, it would be a much preferable way to finance county government than the property tax. It at least has basis in a person’s ability to pay and doesn’t violate our right to own property. If county operations were financed by income or sales tax, the county would suddenly have at their disposal the sizable chunk of money that is currently being allocated to the assessor’s office as that office would no longer be needed.
There was a lot of venom directed at the commissioners at that hearing. No doubt some things could be done to improve the efficiency of county operations, but I believe that in general they are doing their best to deal with a difficult situation. They have inherited some problems from previous administrations. I think that instead of directing all our anger at our local commissioners who are stuck with system for raising revenue that in a word, sucks, it would be more effective to direct our dissatisfaction at the Utah state legislature and demand that they abolish this miserable property tax.
Darrel Russon
2401 E. Coal Creek Rd.
Price, Ut. 84501 (This is in an unincorporated area just to the east of Wellington)
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