Your Opinion: TIFs and tax inequality

Dear Editor:

When it comes to paying taxes that support our city, county, library and schools, is there a standard? Do we have tax payments inequality right here in River City? From recent news stories, I could draw that conclusion?

The back-to-school season has been heralded by local merchants advertising sales of required supplies, often running over $50 per student, just for the classroom school supplies. Add in clothes, backpacks and shoes, and the amount per child becomes staggering.

The State of Missouri each year tries to offset the costs with a three-day tax-free holiday where state sales tax is waived. Local municipalities have the option to waive their portion of sales tax as well. Instead, most area cities opt out and continue to collect their portion of the sales tax. This is understandable, as the need for local services does not go away, and the tax haul can be considerable with more than 10,000 area students all getting ready for another school year.

Meanwhile, the same city leaders that "opt out" of the three-day tax holiday for parents and other individual consumers are busy planning a 23-year tax holiday for hotel rooms. That tax holiday, called a TIF or Tax Increment Financing, is a legal way to divert taxes from schools, libraries and local government to help pay the cost of a private development. The developers may not even live in the capital area or spend their abated dollars here. It hardly seems fair.

City leaders; please carefully consider your upcoming vote on creating tax increment financing districts. TIFs and other tax abatement tools place an undue burden on the disappearing middle income and working poor residents and shoppers. We have yet to see a TIF that will create more than a few good paying jobs; most of the retail and hotel jobs touted in their proposals will be paying low wages. Yet the lack of tax revenue from those TIFs may keep local governments from hiring teachers, librarians, first responders and others whose labor and decent wages drive the local economy.

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