Local Option Sales Tax Money To Be Diverted To Corporate Welfare?

Burn, baby, burn!

From the Des Moines Register, who obviously didn't give a shit about reporting this until now:

City officials could redirect money collected from local-option sales taxes without the public's vote under a last-minute amendment added to a state budget bill in the final hours of this year's legislative session.

It means that special 1-cent sales taxes that voters have approved in hundreds of Iowa cities for such things as road and sewer improvements could instead be used to give tax breaks to developers or in numerous other ways...

...Under the revision, public officials could change the use of the tax collection as long as it's used to help pay for an urban renewal project. Such renewal areas are generally locations that city and state officials have designated as slums or blighted, making them eligible for property tax breaks known as tax increment financing.

Sen. Bob Dvorsky, a Coralville Democrat who was listed as the manager of the 35-page amendment, acknowledged that the issue and a few other proposals wrapped into the amendment probably deserved more debate.

"Sometimes it's just a glitch in the process," Dvorsky said.

Nothing is pushed through without it having a purpose.

There is always some body or some group wanting money behind this stuff.

Always.

We continue:

The idea, proposed as an amendment to a large catchall budget bill, was approved April 25 by both the House and the Senate within hours of being introduced and with little or no debate...

..."This bill allows cities to use a bait-and-switch on their citizens," Michael King, president of the Iowa State Association of Counties, wrote in a May 2 letter to Gov. Chet Culver.

Is nobody in the media looking at these bills? I guess not.

They have the resources to cover cocksucking whores like Paris Hilton, but not enough to cover the cocksucking whores in the Iowa Legislature.

We continue:

Rep. Doug Struyk, a Republican from Council Bluffs, noted that his city would like to divert some of the future growth from its 1-cent tax to develop a multimillion-dollar retail hub. Struyk said he believes that using sales taxes as incentives for developers, rather than strictly containing such breaks to property taxes, would push new developments onto property tax rolls more quickly.

"To me, they're giving up pennies to get to the dollars," Struyk said.

Jesus H. Christ.

Well, we already know that both sides of the aisle in the Iowa Legislature are dirty. Their only job is to get as much taxpayer money as they can for the corporate welfare crowd.

It's disgusting.

Here's how it got in:

The amendment was part of House File 2700, the last budget bill passed by lawmakers before the end of this year's legislative session. The $127 million appropriation, known as the "standings bill," contains money for many state employees' salaries, including a nearly $12,600 raise for Culver.

Traditionally, some lawmakers have referred to the bill as the "Christmas tree," a catchall, last-resort bill where lawmakers tuck ideas that failed earlier in the session or were not brought up for debate.

Kind of like how earmarks are dumped into omnibus bills without debate in Congress.

House Minority Leader Christopher Rants said he believes the tax amendment could face legal challenges because Iowa's constitution directs legislative bills to be focused on a singular subject. Similar legal challenges have failed in previous years, Rants acknowledged.

"It's those kinds of changes where you're taking power out of the hands of voters that deserve to be debated in the light of day," Rants said. "It's the kind of thing that there ought to, at least, be a committee hearing on."

Who's going to pay for those legal challenges?

You are!

And who wants this bill?

Senate Majority Leader Michael Gronstal, a Democrat, acknowledged last week that he is the "primary impetus" behind the local-option change because his hometown, Council Bluffs, is interested in the plan.

Gronstal then points his finger at Rants because Rants tried to pull the same sort of thing a few years ago, which I could believe.

They're all a bunch of liars and whores.

Alan Kemp, executive director of the Iowa League of Cities, wonders if it is constitutional to allow cities to change how special taxes are spent without a public vote.

Also, he worries that using that method would make it less likely that voters would renew local- option taxes. It could create voter distrust because there would be no assurance of how the money would be used, he said...

...Culver has until midnight May 26 to veto items in the bill. Legislation not vetoed becomes law.

The Iowa Legislature, by taking away the OPTION in the local option sales tax when it came to money for schools, has ensured that no further local option sales tax will ever pass in the future. Oh, maybe in places in the state where the voters are exceptionally stupid, like maybe Waterloo, something might pass in the future. But that's about it.

The question I have is: Why don't the watchdogs have a better network?

How come nobody really heard about this until the Des Moines Register printed this story 10 days after Michael King sent his letter to Governor Culver?

You can't rely on fast action by the monopoly corporate newspaper that fewer and fewer central Iowans subscribe to these days.

People should have known about this crap being shoved into the bill the day after it became publicly available via BillWatch, not three weeks later!