Taxing districts can be created without a vote

That's exactly what happened in 2009 and some citizens who were there are still steamed

The horse is no doubt thinking, “Wait a minute. This isn’t what I expected when I signed on for this gig.” It's plausible that the United Union of Equine Assessors strike was the first instance of collective bargaining in the U.S.

Shameless Delayed Gratification Alert: The above subhead reference to 2009 is a bald-faced teaser. I’m promoting a future post focused on the history of the EMS (emergency medical services) taxing district specifically. For now, suffice it to say that in 2009, the Valley County Commission spit in the face of about 50 people who showed up to protest the creation of the original EMS taxing district. You'll have to wait a bit for the details of that story. (Look, I'm a retired newswoman, which means I've never seen a sensational, misleading headline I didn't love.)

I always start with a little history

Taxing districts have been in use since the country's founding. They started as a means to collect taxes on real estate and personal property. The money built the young country's roads, schools and other vital public infrastructure. If you think coal mining is a s-hole job, how would you like to be a colonial 'assessor'? These guys rode around on horses, looked at your property, stuck their fingers in the air and wrote down a number. No databases existed of comparable properties. Can you imagine the gun-point reception their annual visits likely got? Remember, the property owners were prickly. They had just fought a war over taxation. After a certain amount of repetitive trauma, even the assessor's horse probably rejected him as a companion.

@County Assessor Sue Leeper and her staff...you can relate, right?.

Coming in the next two weeks:

EMS Series

• Permanent v.s. Temporary Taxes: How Less is More

• The Raucous Creation of the County's EMS District

• The Apocalypse Model

The resulting roar was called Proposition 13 and it was heard nationwide. California lowered the property tax rate to 1% of a property's assessed value. That same year, Idaho voters followed suit and passed what was called the 1% Initiative that was based on Prop. 13. In 1996, the Idaho Legislature imposed a 3% percent annual cap on total spending by local governments that clearly stated its intent to keep the lid on property taxes. Fossils like me remember that well, but if you are under the age of 50, you may not know what the 3% cap is when I occasionally refer to it. Now you will.

The notion of capping taxes to a set percentage was a prime example of action that really didn't lead to any accomplishment. That's because the Californians and their Idaho admirers forgot to put a cap on the number of taxing districts. Caps are like trying to stop water. You might slow it down temporarily, but with time it always finds a way around whatever obstacle you put against it. Bureaucracy's answer to property tax caps was more taxing districts. Or, better put, more 3% caps, because each district has its own cap and its own board. That's a built-in super-PAC to sell a bigger budget.

When we moved here in 1982, The line items on our property tax bill were the county, the city, the school district and the fire district, along with a pittance for a cemetery district. Between the property we own in McCall and the one we have in the valley, the number of taxing entities has doubled. That number would be even higher if two that were proposed had not been shot down.

Most of the newer line items on our property tax bills are taxing districts that were created to manage budgets that were previously collected and managed by the city and the county. Some of these carve-outs have proved to be a good idea. For example, up until 2017, sewer service in McCall was under the city budget. Then, after a sophomoric turf war that seemed to go on for as long as the Paleozoic Era, the city conceded that they 'sucked' (to quote the city manager at the time) at the sewer business. So they consigned the responsibility to Payette Lake Water/Sewer District. Another good idea was to create separate taxing districts for the Cascade and McCall hospitals, which until 1984 were managed by the county. That move was credited with staunching the red ink that flowed freely under county supervision of these highly specialized and vital institutions.

Taxing District Creation/Dissolution

Not all taxing districts are created at the ballot box. Some are created by elected officials despite palpable opposition. The EMS taxing district, which is proposing a 4.22M levy on Election Day, is one of those. McCall's urban renewal district is another.

I don't know what the exact rules are for creating taxing districts and I'm too lazy to dive into state code to find out (remember, this column is free, so you get what you pay for). Like anything that involves statutory authority, it probably varies with the type of district and there are plenty of loopholes. If any statute-nerd knows the answer to this question, please let me know and I can share. I do know that the hospital district elections were the result of citizen petition.

How comfortable you feel about taxing districts sending you a bill without your electoral consent is a charitable contribution discussion between you and your heirs. I guess the theory is that the officials responsible for such hubris can be voted out of office. And that is true. But, as I will show in a later post, revoking a taxing district once it is created takes an Act of God. You may sack the politicians, but the taxing district lives on. That's why the voter should consider any new taxing district proposal with the utmost care (assuming you're even given the choice). Once it is done, it's in perpetuity. To my knowledge no taxing district has ever been dissolved in this county.

Winner! Winner! Chicken Dinner! Congrats! You've only read the first post of this series and already you know more about taxing districts than half of elected officials.

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Afterthoughts, Observations and Authentications:

I promised you that the main body of each post would be a 3-4 minute read, and I always keep my promises. This is the place for me to nerd out, opine and provide additional background. You are welcome to come along for the ride but it's an additional time commitment that I hope earns its keep.

• Officials of the Countywide EMS taxing district will take exception to my claim that the current taxing district was created without a vote. They say that the taxing district was created last November, and technically, they are correct. But that is a sleight of hand. The election in November simply replaced one taxing district with another. As I will explain in the upcoming post on EMS district history that I promised, the only thing that changed in 2022 was the form of governance. For the current taxing district to credibly claim that it is a "new" entity, it would have to show that patrons were allowed to vote to dissolve the old taxing district before voting to create a new one.

• The EMS taxing district's origin story is moot in the context of the upcoming EMS levy. It doesn't make the current district illegitimate. History verifies that creating taxing districts without a vote can be done, has been done and can still be done. That is essential to your understanding of taxing districts and how they are created. That's the only reason I brought it up.

• I was taught in high school science class that correlation does not equal causation. My speculation that the 3% cap resulted in an explosion of taxing districts is based on purely circumstantial evidence. Certainly there were other factors at work. But I stand by my observation that each taxing district creates its own super-PAC, focused on increasing visibility and funding for causes that used to have to compete for attention in a larger budget. Quoting one of our editorials from May 2020:

"{Each new taxing district} creates a new bureaucracy with inefficiencies inherent to the species and with a tendency to protect its turf and place its survival above the needs of its constituents."

I’ve got a whopper of a story that I think backs up that assertion that I will share in a future post.

• Before recent legislation that outlawed the practice, special elections could be held any time of year. This was a boon to taxation. Major financial commitments in our county were being passed with voter turnouts of as little as 18% (Cascade school bond election March 2023). Today, ballot questions in Idaho must be on the annual May primary ballot or the November general election ballot so voters only have to show up to two elections. In addition to the improvement the two-election policy has made in turnouts, voters can now decide on a full menu of taxation proposed in a one-stop shop. We spent our careers making fun of the Idaho Legislature, but every so often they are capable of genius. I believe in giving credit when credit is due.

• In 2011, the Idaho legislature responded to citizen unrest about urban renewal districts by requiring a vote to create them. The original McCall urban renewal district was created without a vote prior to this legislation. The new, "Downtown West" urban renewal district was created in 2019. McCall was allowed to skirt the voting requirement, probably because the new district replaced an old one, very much in the same way that the EMS district did not originate in 2022. There must be some "How to Get Around Consulting the Electorate" manual that every public official keeps next to their hearts. If they can find a way out of putting a question directly to the voter, they aways take it. In their minds, a couple public hearings equals a consultation. Never in my career did I ever see a public hearing get the turnout an election does, even the one in Cascade (mentioned previously) that got only 18%. I will write about the nervous tick public officials get whenever they hear the words "take a vote" later in the series. I'm not suggesting that we vote on the brand of paper clips the staff uses, or even who the city manager is. But matters of expense involving millions of dollars? Yes, please, and always.

Be sure to drop by the digital archives

In the last years of our careers, Tom talked the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation into financing digital archives of The Star-News and its predecessors, The Cascade News and the Payette Lakes Star. Up until the creation of this free public service, people who wanted to find something in the archives had to paw through volumes of the original print editions housed at the public libraries. Thanks to the LMCF generous assistance, the ridiculously expensive conversion of these archives into a searchable, digital database was accomplished. You can find the archive here. It is worth bookmarking in your browser for future reference.

The mini-civics lessons in this column will eventually be housed with the archives for a complete community reference resource.