By Mayor Dan Williams for The News Courier
We have within our nation, four levels of government. We have our city, our county, our state, and our federal governments. Some of us may only be affected by county, state, and federal because we don’t live in a city. All of us are affected by at least three levels of government, and each level has to be supported by each of us. The only method any level of government has to use to derive revenue is to tax those under its authority, and charge fees for the services it provides to its citizens.
Whenever the government determines that it does not have the revenue to maintain services to its citizens, it must raise taxes and fees, cut services to its citizens, or provide the same services in a more efficient manner. There are no other ways to do it. The federal government can always print more money, but that devalues what we now have and increases the cost of everything. States and local governments do not have that option. Cutting services that citizens now have means they pay the same in taxes and fees, but they don’t get as many services. That is an actual increase in the cost of services they receive. Becoming more efficient in the delivery of services to citizens seems to be the best way to handle decreasing revenues, but this is limited, depending upon how long and severe is the decrease in revenues. At some point more efficient delivery of services will not solve the entire problem.
Our local governments, city and county, are at the mercy of the state and federal levels when a financial crisis occurs. During such crisis the state and federal levels have a tendency to take revenues from the lower levels of government to solve their own problems. An example would be the state oil lease monies that have been set aside for various uses. Part of these monies has been designated to city and county governments to use for capital projects. The state Legislature can go back in and take what it has given to local governments, or it can take the future growth that would normally come to local governments, and use this to shore up their deficits. That leaves the local governments having to deal with current or future losses of revenue.
The state and federal governments can also require local governments to provide services to citizens, and not provide any funding to pay for these services. This is known as unfunded mandates. In my opinion the state and federal governments should never pass unfunded mandates to local governments. They are in effect saying, “This is a very important service to your citizens, but we won’t pay for it. You come up with the money.”
The Legislature can pass bills that we think may be good bills, but they are not what they seem. The Legislature is working on passing a bill that prohibits texting on cell phones while driving. That sounds good because this is a dangerous thing to do. But there may be other distractions that would kill or injure more people than texting. But who will enforce it, and there must be added cost to enforce any action. The Legislature has considered eliminating the sales tax on groceries. That sounds good, especially to poor people, but to make up for that tax, they would eliminate your state income tax deduction on the amount of federal income tax that you pay. This would provide the state more money than the current tax on groceries. This would actually be a tax increase.
I would like to see our state Legislature determine what services the state of Alabama really needs to provide to its citizens, such as prisons, education, transportation, public health and safety, and possibly a few other services. They could then let the local governments provide the other services and let them have the monies to provide the services. State services such as education and transportation also develop huge bureaucracies with ever-increasing costs to administer them and need to be turned upside down every few years to let the squirreled-away monies fall out to our citizens. I feel that our local governments would be able to provide services to its citizens in a much more efficient manner than state bureaucracies if the monies are transferred to us.
