IF YOU WANT POWER, YOU NEED THE NERVE TO TAX

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, February 6, 1992                   TAG: 9202060498
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-13   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: RAY L. GARLAND
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long
IF YOU WANT POWER, YOU NEED THE NERVE TO TAX
IT CANNOT be said of Del. David Brickley, D-Prince William, that he has any monopoly on bad ideas. But it can be said that he seems to love them more and work harder to put them across than any other member of the General Assembly. He now stands on the precipice of achieving one of his most ardently cherished notions: elected school boards. I'm tired of arguing against it, let 'er rip.
But I challenge Brickley and all the other legislators supporting him to go whole hog and do the thing properly. Amend the state constitution to provide for elected school boards vested with the power to levy and collect taxes to support such concepts of pedagogical excess or frugality as they deem fit.
Give them the 1-percent sales tax and all state aid "earmarked" for public schools that now flows through local governing bodies, and that portion of the local property tax dedicated to the same purpose, which shall thereafter be segregated for the schools and subject to being raised or lowered by the school board.
It's a shame it can't be put on the ballot this year, but an election for members of the General Assembly must intervene between first and second passage by the legislature of any amendment to the state's organic law. That means, unfortunately, it can't be voted on by the people until 1994.
The delay is unfortunate because here is an idea whose political time has clearly arrived, but also because Brickley and his crew have a pretty good idea, I suspect, of what's likely to happen when the people really focus on granting elected boards the power to tax - and they deserve to hear it.
But the delay in placing a properly framed proposal before the people isn't really that important when you consider that the bill now before the House of Delegates to allow localities to opt for elected boards without taxing power wouldn't produce a school-board election until 1996!
And even if proponents succeed with a floor amendment moving that rapturous event forward to 1994, it's the same time frame in which Virginians could render a sober verdict on the larger question of electing school boards with full taxing power.
If you go forward without amending the constitution to grant elected boards full fiscal authority (and accountability), you will have the endlessly unedifying spectacle of people running for school-board seats making all manner of wonderful promises and then going head-to-head with those meanies on city council or the board of supervisors to extract the swag to make good on them. Then, you'll have the teacher's party and the anti-teacher's party, etc.
Virginia Beach, where voters have already gone on record favoring elected school boards, is also seeking a radical augmentation of power for its local Development Authority. It is asking the General Assembly to grant the authority the power of condemnation (or eminent domain) previously reserved for projects of public necessity under the municipal government itself, such as roads and sewers.
In the domain of bad ideas this takes the blue ribbon. Industrial-development authorities were created in virtually every locality in Virginia when Congress gave them the power to ordain tax-exempt bonds. Not to issue or back them, mind you - as cities and counties customarily do with their own bonds - but to grant private developers the right to do so in the name of the authority.
In the beginning, these were to be limited to genuine industrial-development projects that would bring manufacturing jobs to depressed areas. But in a fashion typically American, they were extended by obliging politicians to include financing for everything from skating rinks to restaurants.
It got so bad a few years ago that practically nothing of consequence could go forward unless it had the advantage of tax-exempt bonds behind it. I saw them with coupons as high as 16 percent, and quite a few of these went belly-up.
Nor has it stopped. Just the other day, I saw a retirement community in Prince William County offering a 10-percent tax-free yield. Think what that means at a time when taxable bonds are hard-pressed to yield 9 percent with reasonable safety.
Congress has tried to rein in the monster it so recklessly created. Still, in a time when "jobs, jobs, jobs" is the cry on everyone's lips, industrial-development authorities have their place. But it isn't their place to condemn one person's property to help another to use it.
The celebrated bottle bill has been given a new lease on life by Sen. Joe Gartlan, D-Fairfax, who would establish a deposit of 5 to 10 cents that the consumer would get back at a designated recycling center. The good part is that Gartlan's bill would relieve merchants of the awful chore of dealing with hundreds of millions of empty (and dirty) cans and bottles. The bad part is that it will cost millions to do most of what is now being done on a largely voluntary basis.
Let's take a low figure and say that voluntary recycling efforts currently account for only half of all beverage containers and that the mandatory-deposit bill will raise that to 75 percent. To do that, paid employees will have to be on hand at some 250 collection points around the state to count the empties received from consumers and disburse the cash they're due back - for which there will also have to be an accounting.
Will that much bureaucratic effort and consumer inconvenience be worth a gain in recycling that might account for 1 percent of all solid waste generated in this state?

Ray L. Garland is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB