Hands Out of Our Cookie Jar

Reaction was noticeably swift, bi-partisan and sharp from local Falls Church officials against the plans of both favored major party candidates running for governor this year, who launched their candidacies last week by each proposing to decimate virtually the sole revenue source of school and local government operations.

The candidates' anti-tax grandstanding campaign slogans came just as another state legislative session had concluded in Richmond, chiseling local jurisdictions even further with a combination of new unfunded mandates and overrides of local programs and prerogatives.

Republican Jerry Kilgore, the state's attorney general who is favored to beat back a GOP challenger for his party's nomination in June, announced he will seek a constitutional amendment to create an annual cap on the growth of real estate assessments.

Democrat Tim Kaine, who is unopposed seeking the Democratic nomination, also targeted the real estate tax in his attempt to show he's just as tough a tax-cutting guy as his GOP opponent. While Kaine's seems a "kinder, gentler" approach, granting options for assessment reductions to local jurisdictions, its net practical impact is the same. Local political pressures will ensure that those exemptions are applied, with the same kind of devastating results as Kilgore's cap.

As such, both candidates kicked off their campaigns with pledges to seriously impede the sole significant source of income available to local jurisdictions to fund their schools and local services.
How can these candidates be indifferent to the crying need that local jurisdictions have throughout the commonwealth for more, not less, support at the local level?

Kilgore's is an outdated formula for disaster. Hoping to capitalize on the same shallow sentiment that rode Jim Gilmore to victory on the strength of a three-word, "No car tax," slogan in 1997 he's now hoping to translate an arch-conservative agenda to victory with an equally shallow and one-dimensional across-the-board assessment cap form of tax cut in 2005.

Lost on him has been the way that such right wing "anti-tax pledge" politics was defeated in Richmond the past two years in efforts led by more pragmatic Republicans and their Democratic counterparts.

The Kilgore approach has so angered more reasonable Republicans that not only will Kilgore face a stiff challenge in June's GOP primary, but also a Republican turned independent, State Sen. Russell Potts, who will turn the November election into a heated three-way race.
In the context of this, someone at the top of the Kaine and Potts campaigns needs to pay attention, for once, to what's being said at the local level. If someone says that a local tax cut will be made up for by money from Richmond, nobody at the local level will believe it. It's been promised before, and no one will be fooled by that one again.