Smart conservatives support local taxation for a number of solid reasons, but none more important than this one: It's the first-order foundation of self-government.
Going all the way back to colonial times, taxation itself (which Oliver Wendell Holmes called the price we pay for civilization) has never been the problem. What the colonists resented and resisted was unrepresented taxation commandeered by faraway Parliament for its purposes.
Conservatives have rightly cast a wary eye toward tax schemes that send money to state capitals and Washington, D.C., where bureaucracies create waste, inefficiency and unintended consequences. Communities that tax themselves locally, however, are the purest form of the American experiment.
In the early days of the republic, the federal government had no money, and local communities had no expectation of financial assistance from it.
Their schools, crime issues, health care, streets and sanitation, and economy were all matters of primary importance, and the people responsible for looking out for their best interests were themselves. Their famed town-hall meetings boiled down to collectively prioritizing community needs and figuring out how to formulate local tax strategies to fund them.
Those communities with the most foresight, vision and planning tended to thrive. Those with the most infighting, naysaying and non-planning tended to struggle.
It's a pattern that continues to this day.
In cities as in life, failing to plan is planning to fail. Looking over the state map, a given city's fortunes can change pretty quickly, and often do. Some formerly prominent cities and towns are empty shadows of what they once were. Some formerly obscure places have ballooned beyond what anyone thought they could be.
In those places struggling with lost population and hard times, residents often remark how fast the decline befell them. In those celebrating growth and prosperity, they routinely point to heroic efforts by local crusaders, which typically included investment through local taxation.
Great communities don't happen by accident. Prudent self-government is attained by self-taxation. How to best fund and plan growth is something cities large and small constantly grapple with. A timely example is the one-cent sales tax campaign in Jonesboro.
Voters on Tuesday will decide the fate of the grass-roots proposal that introduced an innovative accountability twist: Its ordinance restricts revenue uses to police, fire and a few specific "quality of life" capital categories. It created an "Oversight Integrity Council" to review and recommend eligible projects. That committee heard preliminary requests from citizens and nonprofit groups last week, and, intrigued by the concept, I sat in on some of the presentations.
I'd been in the Chambers room, and others like it in nearby towns, before. I'd also watched live-streamed video of council or subcommittee meetings from there--most of which, let's face it, can be pretty dry. The feeling I normally get from such meetings, true or false, is that much of the discussion and decision-making seems to have already happened backstage.
This Oversight Integrity Council was surprisingly different.
In ordinary municipal meetings there are a lot of bored expressions around the table. But the council members were as engaged as the presenters. It was obvious from their questions that they were active listeners and paying close attention.
The presenters were all passion-filled people and strong believers in the projects they proposed. Each articulated well-planned dreams for a better city. All the projects sought to provide real community benefits to people and visitors via parks, recreational facilities, museums, arts centers, libraries, bicycle paths, sidewalks, and more.
I'd call it de Tocqueville déjà vu. Here were ordinary citizens, many of them making do with underfunded ingenuity to serve Jonesboro's surging population needs, coming alive with vibrant ideas on how their city can catch up to its better-funded peers on high-value public amenities.
You couldn't have cut the energy in that room with a lightsaber.
It was impressive. It was powerful. It was uniting. It was inspiring.
I wish everyone could have seen what I saw.
My rural address is outside the city limits, so I can't vote for the penny tax in Jonesboro. But I can say with confidence that it has kindled the kind of animating force that propels communities forward when they confront a seminal moment of truth, as all cities must do at certain population milestones.
Raising the sales tax would bring Jonesboro right in line with the state average, but still below all the central and northwest Arkansas cities of comparable size, and a full penny or more lower than most neighboring towns.
The proverbial penny-wise/pound-foolish lesson unfortunately remains lost on some well-meaning conservatives who lump national and local taxation together as equal evils. As with other blinder/blunder situations, the big picture suffers.
Once tax dollars leave a city and get sent to bolster budgets in Washington or Little Rock, they never come back whole. And whatever fraction does filter back usually winds up funding reactive safety-net programs, not fueling proactive civic and community investment for progress.
Only local tax proceeds can do that, and they do it at full strength and face value.
Smart conservatives should understand that. And vote accordingly.
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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial on 09/06/2019