He’s tired of  unfair taxation

Published 4:42 pm Tuesday, February 8, 2022

Editor, The Smithfield Times:

The Smithfield Times’ Feb. 2 edition on page 11 had 2 articles of interest.

“Isle of Wight to oppose tax cuts” addresses House Bill 297 suspending regional fuel taxes for one year that also funds the Hampton Roads Transportation Accountability Commission that pretends to allocate transportation taxes to projects, when VDOT ultimately determines those funding levels. This is corroborated in the eighth sentence of this article quoting a county official: “In order to stay in those projects, it would come to each of the localities to try to figure out how to make up for the shortfall … the cost would be catastrophic.”

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This already happened as presented in the Nov. 24 edition of this paper (“IW to share in Nike Park cost/Isle of Wight will commit up to 50% of the VDOT ‘shortfall’ not to exceed $2.2 million”). Sentence 11 addresses House Bill 380, which “further proposes to prohibit any county, city or town from imposing any license tax or fee on or after Jan.1, 2023,” another welcome relief from unfair taxation.

In the next article, “Sales tax bills pass Senate,” SB 472 would allow the county to raise the sales tax by 1% to pay for school construction, but once completed, the increase will not go away. The county has received pandemic federal funds and more are coming from the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act that can be used for school construction.

Recent upsurge in home values and new developments are bringing additional property taxes to the county. And the county’s Enterprise funds: Where is that money really going?

Officials opposing tax cuts forget after elections their promises of no new taxes. Fortunately, the residents have long memories and are smart to realize the 1% tax increase at referendum time is not needed. Any penny the government unnecessarily extracts is a loss of freedom to the citizens.

 

Jose Hernandez

Carrollton