ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, May 14, 1996 TAG: 9605140028
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
THAT CRASH you heard last week wasn't a waitperson dropping his or her tray at your favorite Roanoke eatery. It was City Council hastily dropping the very idea of an increase in the local restaurant-meals tax from 4 percent to 5 percent, the state-allowed maximum.
Less than 48 hours after the delicate subject had been broached at a council budget session, on the day after Tuesday's councilmanic elections, Mayor David Bowers pronounced the notion of that or any other new tax unpalatable.
This was no shock. None of the candidates for council had run on a platform of raising taxes. Earlier, City Manager Bob Herbert had unveiled a proposed 1996-97 municipal budget with no new taxes.
But, above all, it's not surprising because the scenario fits today's political zeitgeist: Anything remotely resembling a tax increase, no matter what kind or for what purpose, is viewed as political suicide. Taxes aren't the tab for government services; they're the poison fed by bureaucrats to a heaving body politic.
And yet the meals-tax option shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, now or in the future. (Bowers, to his credit, didn't rule it out for next year.) The point isn't that the tax needs to go up. It's that consideration of the idea needs to be politically permissible.
Like cities and counties across America, Roanoke is starting to feel the fiscal pressure from retrenchment in federal and state programs that aid localities. The city can ill afford to reject out of hand any potential source of new revenue.
Already, for example, the federal mass-transit subsidy for Valley Metro has dropped from about $1 million per year to $574,000 for the city's fiscal year beginning July 1. The roughly $3 million per year in federal Community Development Block Grant money that comes to Roanoke, for a variety of services geared to low-income and elderly people and neighborhoods, is expected to drop by 10 percent in the city's 1996-97 fiscal year.
Meanwhile, city schools have embarked on an ambitious program to boost teacher salaries; and city workers are getting extraordinary raises. If Roanoke is to prosper, there must be public investment in such future-oriented projects as a downtown higher-education center. And visitor-promotion efforts are seriously underfunded.
Those efforts, under the idea informally floated last week, would be the $1.2-million annual beneficiary of raising the meals tax to 5 percent. Like a local gas tax - a Roanoke-proposed suggestion, to offset the loss of federal funds for Valley Metro, that the '96 General Assembly rejected - meals taxes have the parochial virtue of not being imposed entirely on local residents.
If the trends continue, and if an increase in the meals tax isn't a good answer, then city policy-makers should be prepared to offer a better one. Raise the real-estate or personal-property tax rate? Eliminate city buses? Freeze the pay of city and school employees? Abandon investments in the future?
City officials are right to show taxing restraint - to discipline spending, to avoid piling on citizens' burdens, to stay competitive with neighboring localities. But pledges and pandering are no substitute for hard choices. Given the possible selections on Roanoke's future fiscal menus, a meals-tax hike might soon look more appetizing.
LENGTH: Medium: 62 linesby CNB