Race Is on to Get Sales Tax Hike Approved

by: Bill Liblick

Will there be a sales tax increase for Sullivan County in time for the summer? We can only wonder what the impact for our cash strapped county will be if it is not.

According to people in the know, there is still time for the tax hike to go into effect by July 1. And it looks as if State Senator John Bonacic, Assemblywoman Aileen Gunther, and our legislature are in agreement in the language.

It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

On one hand, if we do not see an increase before summer, and the cause and effect is minimal, that could be a sign that the hike was not needed in the first place. Or it could mean that County Manager David Fanslau was able to save us enough money through his restructuring of government and cost saving measures.

This is an election year and the entire Sullivan County Legislature will be up for grabs. If our financial woes deepen, and cutbacks are implemented due to no raise in sales tax, how will this look when our incumbents face the electorate?

Assemblywoman Aileen Gunther for months said she backed the boost in our sales tax by .05 percent, while Bonacic wavered. But, he has said for quite sometime that he wanted more information, and answers to how the Legislature approved new employment positions, when they said they had no money.

Bonacic was also aware that people like Town of Thompson Supervisor Tony Cellini has been advocating, if there is going to be an increase in sales tax, towns should receive a percentage of the revenue. Our State Senator listened while no one else did. After some hardball, our legislature is listening to Bonacic and Cellini.

The new portion of the sales tax received by towns will hopefully go towards lowering real property taxes.

Legislature Chairman Christopher Cunningham, Finance Chairman Jonathan Rouis, and County Manager David Fanslau should have listened to Bonacic and Cellini months ago. Now the race is on to get it all approved for the summer.

No one wants to pay more in taxes. Fanslau appears to be serious in his desire to manage our government more efficiently. Running Sullivan County has become very difficult, in part because so much property is off our tax rolls. Our tax base is continually sinking because of the lack of high paying employment opportunities. That is a sad fact. We also continually witness delays for such projects as Indian run casinos, which might finally lift to our economy.

Another problem Sullivan County taxpayers have is the huge sum of monies we spend on Medicaid and other social service programs. These programs are literally bleeding us.

It would be a shame if the sales tax increase is not approved in time for us to benefit from all the outside summer dollars. These monies could greatly help our coffers. A tax hike is inevitable, so we can only hope the mechanism is there to quickly move it along.

Email Bill