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

DATE: FRIDAY, April 30, 1993                   TAG: 9304300008
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NO STICKER SHOCK THIS TIME - CAR DECALS ALL GREEN

There are a lot of cheap shots taken at our local system of government, the theme every time being that the little guy - you, usually - is victimized every time some stubborn, knot-head in this city refuses to cooperate with some unyielding, hare-brain in that county.

It is only fair, then, to also point out when there emerges some grand scheme that crosses our artificial boundaries and benefits us all.

Consider for an instant the personal property tax.

Undoubtedly the most blatant tax rip-off since the colonists told the king to flake off in 1776, the personal-property tax in Virginia forces you to pay a yearly fee on the value of your car. If you bought a $10,000 car in 1985, you have since then paid $1.8 million in personal property tax on it. It's absolutely unconscionable.

To prove you've paid this sinful bit of blood money to your smiling revenue commissioner, you are forced to buy - for ANOTHER 10 or 15 bucks a year - a decal for your windshield.

Each jurisdiction prints its own decal, and each changes the color yearly so that deadbeat nonpayers can be easily apprehended and shipped to a leper colony.

Roanoke (the city), Roanoke (the county), Botetourt (another county) and Franklin (still another county) all are issuing green decals this year.

Last year, they all had different colors, from Botetourt burgundy to Franklin red.

Clearly, they sat down and coordinated the design of their stickers, so that a special squadron of police goons could sit in the roadside weeds, waiting for a non-green tax sticker to drive by and then bust the noggin of the poor wretch driving the delinquent vehicle.

This smooth bit of inter-municipal planning helps enforce the rules so that we all equally suffer this ridiculously unfair tax.

"It's just a coincidence," says Jerome Howard, the modest revenue commissioner in Roanoke. He says the city alternates between white and blue, blue and white, and green decals. This is the green year.

This is the green year, too, in Botetourt, which decides on the color each year when the sticker-salesman spreads out this year's designer colors and somebody picks out a pretty hue.

Roanoke County picks one of four colors from the city seal and makes that the decal color - red, white, green or blue. In that grand rotational scheme, we enter now green-decal season.

"I assure you, it was absolutely unplanned," says a county employee, pleading for anonymity. "You see the unseen hand of providence at work here, nothing more."

Surely, then, the courageous leadership for this spate of green tax decals and sensible planning must have sprung from Franklin County - which knocked some municipal heads and called for simple cooperation.

"No, indeed," says Elaine Chitwood, the county treasurer. "If the rest of 'em got together and planned for green stickers, they didn't call me. That's for sure."

Our fragmented hodgepodge of governments knocks about in a totally unworkable system of uncoordination, petty jealousy and duplication. But once in a while, they do things right - purely by accident.

by CNB