ONLY POLITICIANS GAIN WHEN POWERS
OF TAXING AND SPENDING ARE DIVIDED

What is the most pernicious practice in government in Connecticut?

It might be the division of the responsibility for raising revenue from the responsibility for spending it. The result is that no one seems to be responsible for much of anything in government in Connecticut anymore.

This was suggested the other day when the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities announced a public-relations campaign to build support for what is called property tax relief and reform. The campaign will have billboards, pamphlets, and a telephone "hotline" urging people to ask their state legislators to increase state financial aid to cities and towns.

The municipalities conference has a point. Despite all the attention paid to Connecticut's income and gasoline taxes, the local property tax raises more money than any tax in the state and is probably the most disproportionate when compared to taxation in other states. Meanwhile Governor Rowland's budget proposal would hold state financial aid to cities and towns below the rate of inflation.

But conspicuously absent from the CCM's campaign is any mention of the property tax relief and reform that is proposed by Rowland's budget. That is, legislation to weaken binding arbitration rules for municipal public employee union contracts and to remove many expensive issues from collective bargaining with those unions.

Local officials rightly complain about state government's failure to pay for the "mandates" it imposes on local government -- state requirements that local government perform certain services or follow certain rules. In recent years state legislators and governors blithely have legislated such mandates and have gotten the political credit for them with special interests, while local officials have gotten stuck with the bills, which have had to be paid through the property tax, the only revenue-raising power cities and towns have.

But by clamoring for more state aid to pay for the state mandates while failing to rush to support the repeal of those mandates, local officials suggest that they are no better than state officials. That is, local government wants the credit for spending without having to do the work of taxing just as much as state government does. And of course few people at any level of government are eager to do the very hardest and most unpleasant work of saving money by resisting the demands of that most influential special interest, the public employee unions.

Now that a sweeping proposal for mandate relief, and thus for property tax relief, is at last on the table in the General Assembly, local officials have no enthusiasm for it. No, they just want more money from Hartford without restrictions on spending it.

Indeed, this evasion of responsibility has been going on even longer on the municipal level than on the state level with the division of taxing and spending authority between local town councils and school boards. Only the councils can raise revenue for a town and set its tax rate. But school boards, with no responsibility for setting the tax rate, typically spend the great majority of the money raised in taxes. As a result, councils are less sensitive than they should be to educational needs and school boards are less sensitive than they should be to the tax burden.

In a perfect political world no politician would be able to get away with this stuff. Whoever had the responsibility and did the tough political work of raising the money through taxes would have the political benefit of spending it. And there would be no finger pointing, no shifting of responsibility, and no excuses for anyone at any level or branch of government, state or local, council or school board.

The solution to this problem on the local level is simple enough. It is just to give school boards the power to set the part of a town's tax rate that raises the revenue necessary for the school portion of the town budget. School spending wouldn't quickly get out of control, for suddenly people concerned about the tax burden would become candidates for school boards instead of concentrating their political interest on town councils, as they do now.

The solution on the state level would be more difficult. But it might involve setting a consistent, statewide property tax rate to replace all the differing local property tax rates, and consolidating all forms of state aid to towns into a single grant determined by a formula that applied throughout the state and incorporated all the usual variables: population, poverty, and so forth. The total amount every town could spend each year would be determined by the statewide formula, and that formula would be written by the governor and the legislature.

Then town officials wouldn't have any responsibility for taxes anymore, just for spending. But most of what towns spend today is hardly a matter of local option and control in the first place; to the contrary, it is required by state law or even by the state Constitution, starting with education. While Connecticut prattles on about "local control," "local control" long has been a myth in regard to nearly everything in government finance here. The myth might be missed, but the system of political excuses it facilitates wouldn't be.