Tax, tax, tax - then tax some more

If you haven’t personally felt the warm rays of economic health shining on your shoulders, just look around. Evidence is everywhere, nowhere more clearly than with the fresh-framed skeletons of new construction.

All those new buildings and improvements are expanding the property tax base and enriching Kootenai County’s taxing entities. County government and cities are big beneficiaries because the more property taxes come in, the more they have to spend. In good times like these, the windfalls from new construction should go a long way to providing citizens tax relief.

Yet they aren’t. In many cases, governments are going beyond putting their arms around all the new growth chips on the table. They’re reaching into your pockets because they’ve determined those new growth dollars simply aren’t enough.

In one case, the almost always fiscally conservative Post Falls, even that’s not enough. Post Falls is proposing using all its new growth dollars, taking the full 3 percent property tax hike allowed by state law, and collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars in foregone taxes to meet its Fiscal Year 2017 budget needs. Foregone taxes represent the amount of taxes governments and school districts can collect each year, but don’t. For instance, if Post Falls collects a 1 percent property tax increase, it can later collect the other 2 percent allowed by law if it decides to. It’s a devilish debt; you might not even know it’s there until a taxing entity decides to collect it. In Post Falls’ case, the city’s solution to paying for street lights is to collect from property tax owners the equivalent of another 3 percent this coming year from foregone. That means a 6 percent property tax increase for Post Falls homeowners, not even counting funds from new growth.

This is not to focus the spotlight of shame on the River City alone. Coeur d’Alene is planning to take the full 3 percent tax increase. So is Kootenai County. In Kootenai County’s case, the full 3 percent take is disappointing mostly because commissioners have been sitting on a $37 million gold mine known as a fund balance. They’ve dedicated almost a third of that to a bigger and better jail and they’re considering other legitimate expenses, but we wonder: Instead of raising taxes forever to fund higher wages for county employees, why not eschew a tax hike and instead use a small slice of that $37 million and give employees one-time merit bonuses?

No matter how much of the taxpayers’ money is filling the cookie jars that feed government already, somehow, they always find room for more. That’s hard to swallow, even during the best of economic times.