City council resolution puts tax vote one step closer
The purpose of the Monday, April 25 city council meeting was to determine if there was sufficient interest in going forward with a resolution that would allow state legislatures to allow the city to hold an election to replace the half-cents sales tax with property tax increase.
The public’s response was an overwhelming ‘yes.”
The resolution was unanimously approved by all council members.
“We expected a lot of folks to show up and I was pretty sure people were going to have trouble sticking to the specific question of whether or not to ask the legislature to allow us to vote said City Council President Tommy Overcash. “But I think most folks can agree the majority of people, depending on which tax they were for, still would like the people to have the voice.
More than 20 residents voiced their opinion on the topic.
Amanda Holland is one of those residents.
“When you have sales tax, it can be unpredictable,” Holland told the council during public comments. “As a mother of three very small kids, I would love to see predictable revenue so I know in the future the school system will be taken care of.”
Resident Gordon Brown was for the increase in property taxes because he said the half-cents sales tax isn’t strong enough to support schools with Madison’s current standards.
“Madison doesn’t have the stores that sell big-ticket items that will bring in sales tax that will support schools,” Brown said. “Families move to Madison for schools. If they want that advantage, then we need to have the ad valorem tax to control that.”
But, not everyone was in favor of the increase. One retired resident who draws from social security said she hasn’t had a child in the school system since 1983, and she is still paying a large amount of taxes.
No matter if who was for or against the increase, the issue was deciding on the vote and that is what was determined.
Superintendent Dr. Dee Fowler gave a presentation on why the city needs the property tax increase instead of the half-cents tax.
Fowler said it was urgent to go ahead with the increase because the ad valorem tax is collected in arrears, which means if a vote takes place in 2012, taxes won’t be collected until 2013.
“I am firmly for a vote regarding this,” he said.
Overcash said the next step in the process is to forward the resolution to the state legislature allowing with the draft bill. But, he said the election wouldn’t be time to have the election wouldn’t be anytime soon.
“We really had to hurry because they will only be in session for another couple weeks,” he said. “There is no time limit, we could have (the election) this August, or we could have it the following November.
Basically once it’s approved, we can schedule at the appropriate time and we want to allow plenty of time to have numerous public forums and then let people have their say about whether they like property taxes or sales taxes or no taxes.”
