Candidate Says Fees A Better Way To Impact Taxes Sheroke Disparages Rankin’s Tax Initiative

If the state had let communities legally adopt impact fees in 1992, Ron Rankin’s property-tax limiting initiative wouldn’t sound so appealing.

That was Kootenai County commissioner candidate Chuck Sheroke’s assessment of Rankin’s One Percent Initiative Friday, outlined at a weekly Democratic luncheon.

Sheroke said as early as 1992, he alone was an outspoken proponent of impact fees. It wasn’t until earlier this year that legislators passed a law allowing communities to add such fees to the sale of new homes and businesses to pay for roads, police or other services.

“Had this been done years ago, your property taxes today would have been a lot less than they are and our schools would have been in a lot better shape,” Sheroke said. “They have risen because property taxes were used to pay for growth.”

The environmental attorney is battling tax-activist Rankin for the commission seat now held by lame-duck Republican Bob Macdonald. Friday, he used the forum to attack the centerpiece of Rankin’s tax reform ideas, the One Percent Initiative.

“Do we need property tax relief? You bet,” Sheroke said. “Do we need the One Percent? No.

“Impact fees require that those most responsible for growth pay for growth,” Sheroke said. Rankin’s initiative, meanwhile, “won’t work and it’s a blunderbuss approach to the problem.”

Rankin’s initiative would allow out-of-state residents - who own 25 percent of Idaho’s land - a property tax break that would be made up by full-time residents, Sheroke said. It would allow counties to become “tax czars” that determine how much money other taxing districts can raise.

The law’s so poorly written it will lead to endless litigation, he said, and if it ever did work it would carve $220 million from state coffers without suggesting what programs should be cut as a result.

“Who will fund the schools?” Sheroke asked. “A state Legislature that places schools in such a low priority that Idaho ranks 49th in per student funding. That make you comfortable?”

Rankin, reached later by phone, maintained that Sheroke’s assessment of the tax initiative was off base.

“He’s talking pennies and we’re talking dollars,” Rankin said. “There’s no way impact fees would ever have covered the (tax) increases we’ve had.”

Most of the tax increases in the past four years came as a result of increased land values, which would have risen with or without impact fees, Rankin said. And the new impact fee law likely will make land values increase even faster.

“The only way to cut taxes is to cut spending,” he said, and his initiative does that.

Rankin also said the state had increased tax collection so much in four years that it had more money than it needed. Hundreds of millions of dollars could be cut without cutting services.

“When a corporation has a good year it gives money back in the form of dividends,” Rankin said. “That’s what taxpayers need.

“I don’t think they need to cut services,” he continued. “They need to tighten budgets.”

And, he said, despite what people think, schools are run primarily by the state right now, so there wouldn’t be any “loss” of local control.

“If you owned 18 percent of GM stock and I owned the rest, how much control would you have? None, other than what I gave you,” Rankin said. “That’s the way it is now. There is no local control.”

, DataTimes