-- Susan B. Anthony
Yesterday morning in the Courier-Journal, reporter Dick Kaukas sought to plot the county council's discordant lurching back and forth as it considers a final vote on the Local Option Income tax (LOIT). Kaukas might have saved words (and trees) by simply publishing on-line video of a novice trying to learn how to drive a stick shift. I've emphasized one key paragraph.
Floyd briefly pauses on tax plan; Final council vote likely to be Dec. 9.
… For a while, however, the council considered putting off the (LOIT tax) until next year.
The tax, providing 1 percent for property-tax relief and 0.25 percent for police and firefighters, won preliminary approval Wednesday by a 4-3 vote with the council's four Democrats voting yes and the three Republicans opposed.
But Friday morning, council President Larry McAllister, one of the Democrats, said he and other council members had received so many calls from opponents that he decided to pull the ordinance from next month's agenda.
Instead, McAllister said, he was persuaded by arguments to wait until after the next General Assembly session before enacting anything."We're going to wait until after the first of the year," McAllister said, adding that the council could revisit the issue at that time. He said he checked with fellow council members and they were in agreement. The tax had been scheduled to take effect Jan. 1 if it passed.
The three other Democrats who voted for the tax -- Ted Heavrin, Tom Pickett and Carol Shope -- said they were willing to go along with the delay.
Besides, Heavrin said, because of pressure from opponents, "I'm not sure we'll have the votes" anyway, although none of the Democrats said they had changed their position.
Asked about the possibility that one of their number would defect, Shope said, "That would surprise me" …
… That's where things stood -- for about an hour.
Then Teresa Plaiss, the county auditor, said she checked with Ice Miller, an Indianapolis law firm that advises county governments, and was told that if the council didn't act by Dec. 31, it would not be able to consider an income tax until after April 1, and no tax revenue would come in until October.
McAllister said that convinced him the ordinance should stay on the Dec. 9 agenda.
Dana Fendley, a Republican council member who voted no, said McAllister's shifts indicated he was capitulating to pressure, first from police and firefighters who support the tax and then from callers who opposed it.
McAllister said he was trying to be responsive to callers, but then realized that a delayed vote would result in too long a wait for any new tax money.
As Gomer Pyle once said, "Surprise, surprise."
Apparently the result of all this caterwauling has been an unfortunate case of whiplash, at least in the case of one council member, Carol Shope. As Mrs. Baird posted last evening at her The Voice of the People blog, she who abstained in July with respect to the previous LOIT proposal and then voted "yes" in November will opt for "no" the next time around, achieving a trifecta of bullet-dodging completism previously attained by city councilman Dan Coffey, among others.
I saw Carol Shope tonight and she asked me to inform everyone I know that she will vote NO on the LOIT Tax at the December 9th County Council meeting.
If anyone reading can detect a pattern in these county council gyrations, can you please construct a flow chart so the rest of us can keep up?
