Since 1987, the County of El Paso has been getting a quarter of the sales tax collected in the city. Of that eight and a quarter cents that gets collected off every dollar spent on taxable goods, the City gets a penny and a half and the County gets a hay-penny.
And now the Mayor wants that half cent back. From KVIA:
“For whatever reason, our city government, in 1987, determined that they were going to give a quarter of our sales tax revenues to the County. We are the only city in the State of Texas where that occurs. Only,” said [El Paso Mayor Dee] Margo, who called the discovery of the money being given to the County every year “a revelation.”
Reps. Henry Rivera and Sam Morgan also questioned the policy and asked what could be done to stop the “subsidies.”
“The City is struggling – day-to-day – to pay its bills,” said City Representative Sam Morgan, “What I’m hearing is that we need to bring more businesses here, we need to get our property values adjusted, we need this and that. Well, you know what, we need $42 million that we are using to subsidize the County.”
I have a novel approach to this situation: The City should stop spending so much money.
If the City, somehow, claws back this policy of giving sales tax money to the County, how will that affect the taxpayer? I reckon the County will have to raise taxes. So the taxpayer still gets it in the shorts, just in the County’s slice of the taxpayers’ pie, instead of the City’s.
If you listen to the latest propaganda coming out of City Hall, all you hear is how the City needs more money. It’s as though our elected representatives don’t understand the link between spending money and paying bills.
Stop spending money and see how fast the savings accumulate.
Exactly! It is very much like that fee that used to be covered by the City’s budget every year for waste water disposal or some such. The City decided a couple of years ago that it would no longer include that in the annual budget, and passed the buck back to the PSB, which promptly added it to our monthly water bill. There is no end to the spending, and they are running out of ways to suck up more and more of our tax dollars. Stop spending what we do not have!