Posted on 07/10/2004 9:21:30 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento, a key Democratic player in budget talks, on Friday blamed a band of shopping mall-heavy cities for holding up budget negotiations over the matter of protecting their bank accounts.
Steinberg said he and other lawmakers, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and local government groups agree that city and county treasuries must be protected in the state constitution.
But he said cities, in particular those paying their bills from large sales tax bases, are asking for too much, to the possible peril of other government services, and are balking at important changes to the system through which the state distributes taxes to local governments.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
lol.. It's just never enough.
One for you.
Maybe the state should start buying some of their own lottery tickets.
Democrats are holding up a budget to avoid spending cuts next year. If local governments are guaranteed funds, that means less pork for Democratic special interest groups and the party's other constituencies. That's what is at the heart of the current impasse in Sacramento.
More than happy to run with the ball. The state, as well as many younger Freepers have a very short memory.
Within my life time the property taxes/use fees collected within the local government boundaries by local governments were substantially the exclusive revenue of local governments and the state got involved only to 1) help make taxation more uniform across California 2) administer the program for a small fee.
A Democrat administration, Pat Brown's (principally through the manipulations of Jesse Unruh), changed that basic concept and about thirty years later a Republican administration, Pete Wilson's, simply began the wholesale diversion of locally collected tax/fee revenues to the state's General Fund.
As an example if the state simply let local governments keep as little as 30% of the property taxes they collected to do with as they pleased (pre 1965) there would be no argument today. There would simply be an insolvent state government....as logic dictates it should be.
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