I-695 Cuts Hurt Counties, Not State, Officials Say Pend Oreille Leaders Agree To Share Burden Of Lost Tax Revenues If Initiative Passes

Pend Oreille County’s elected officials and other department heads agreed Monday to share the pain if tax-cutting Initiative 695 passes. They just didn’t know how.

There could be plenty of pain to go around.

Chief Deputy Treasurer Terri Miller estimated the county will lose $600,000 if voters pass the initiative and repeal the state motor vehicle excise tax. That compares with a general fund budget of approximately $5 million.

Much of the loss would be in criminal justice money that supports the sheriff’s and prosecutor’s offices and the District Court. But county commissioners and other county officials said they don’t expect those three departments to bear the full brunt.

Sheriff Jerry Weeks said he would hold two vacant deputy positions open, but police protection would be severely curtailed if other departments didn’t help out and he had to cut four deputies. The department has only a dozen line officers other than the sheriff and undersheriff.

Weeks said he doesn’t think he could continue to operate the county jail if he loses a jailer, but state law may not allow him to close the facility.

“It’s right at the teetering point now,” Weeks said.

Around the room, several other departments had similar dilemmas.

Planning and Building Director Gary Fergen said loss of a planner would bring the county’s already delayed efforts to satisfy the state Growth Management Act almost to a standstill. State officials might be sympathetic, but individuals might sue the county for failure to implement the law, Fergen said. Assessor Steve Thompson said he might quit making assessment maps, but other cuts in his department could actually cost the county more money by reducing its ability to collect property taxes.

“We’ve never faced anything as monumental as this,” Thompson said. Weed Board Director Sharon Sorby said commissioners could force land owners to pay the full cost of spraying for noxious weeds and eliminate county contributions to her department. But Commissioners Karl McKenzie and Mike Hanson didn’t like that idea, either.

“It’s hard to do a tax increase when the people are cutting taxes,” McKenzie mused.

Hanson said he is firmly opposed to any such tax or fee increase in “one of the most impoverished counties in the state.”

If no one wants to lay off employees or cut programs, the alternative is salary cuts, McKenzie suggested without enthusiasm. Weeks and others ruled that out in view of the requirement to negotiate with unions and the fact that county salaries already are low.

“If you took 20 percent off my deputies’ wages, they could do just as well on welfare,” Weeks said.

In fact, he said, some of them already are drawing state benefits because they are paid so little.

Thompson, Miller and Terry Hatfield, an accountant in the auditor’s office, said I-695 will create another expensive headache for the county by reinstating the personal property tax on vehicles. Hatfield said the auditor’s computer isn’t adequate for the job and Thompson estimated it would cost his department $100,000 to set up a program for monitoring the county’s 14,000 cars. In comparison, Thompson said, his department monitors 15,400 parcels of land, but “they’re not moving all around.”

Because cars would be taxed according to their location at noon on Jan. 1, he predicted all the cars in the county will be in Priest River, Idaho, at that time unless the Legislature finds a better solution. Among the elected officials at Monday’s staff meeting, Republicans and Democrats alike chided the Legislature for state spending increases in the face of a tax revolt. A new state Ecology Department program to survey flows in private wells was cited as an example of what Hanson said is the state’s ability to soak up money like a “sponge.”

“They really don’t care that we’re sitting out here unable to provide a decent level of service,” Hanson said.

Thompson agreed: “People think they’re attacking the state, but so far they’ve only attacked the counties.”