I get back to Madison, and things go from bad to worse. Let's not jump to conclusions....
The Madison City Commission meets Monday night to consider a revamped special maintenance fee to generate additional money for street repairs. This is the same dollar-per-frontage-foot fee, authorized by the same statute, that the city passed in May, then illegally rescinded when citizens called for a public vote. The only change: the fee is capped at $100 per property parcel.
So if you own a skinny lot with just 50 feet facing the street, you would pay $50 a year to fix the streets. If you own a wider lot with 100 feet facing the street, you pay $100. If you own a corner lot with 150 feet facing the street, you pay $100.
And if you are, say, Dan Roemen, and you own a grocery store that takes up nearly an entire block and 1,000 feet of street frontage, you pay $100. If you are Pat Prostrollo and own a car lot that fronts some 1,600 feet, you pay $100.
Do you see where I'm going?
One of the citizen complaints about Madison's first swing at a special maintenance fee was that it unfairly laid the tax burden on too narrow a segment of citizens. However fair any property tax may be as a means for financing roads, this capped fee formula does nothing to address the concerns raised by opponents of the original fee. Low-income and fixed-income folks with smaller properties pay an even larger proportion of the capped fee than they would have paid of the original fee. The capped fee does nothing to capture a fair share from us out-of-towners who own no property in Madison but tear merrily up and down Main Street with our Volkswagens and bikes and what-not.
The only people whose lot this new proposal improves are folks with big lots. The cap adds regressivity to an already unfair tax, reducing the tax burden on our wealthiest landholders and reducing the new revenue available for road repairs to less than the amount that commissioners cut from last year's existing revenue collections.
From the broadest Tea Party perspective, the capped fee is good because it doesn't transfer as much money from the free market to the government. But it's still a tax increase, and it places a greater portion of the burden on the little guy. And local Tea drinkers can't like that.
