Rural areas should pull own weight

Rural areas should pull own weight

Kansas City Star, The (MO) - May 30, 2005 Author: MIKE HENDRICS

If you're a city dweller in JoCo, and you believe everyone should pull his own weight, then you're going to love this idea from County Commissioner John Segale.

He wants to raise taxes.

Not yours - theirs.

See, already this is sounding pretty good, right?

You see, Segale wants a tax boost, but not in the cities. He wants one in the unincorporated areas of Johnson County.

He would like to raise taxes on houses in rural subdivisions and on little acreages out in the countryside, south of Overland Park and Olathe.

You know, those lovely farmettes with the horses and the fishing ponds and those little Ford tractors out back.

Exactly. The folks we all envy for their lifestyle and for their lower property taxes.

According to Segale, rural Johnson County residents often demand and get citylike services, yet they don't pay a city tax levy.

Police protection and road maintenance out in the unincorporated areas are subsidized.

By whom?

By city dwellers.

It has been that way for years, and it will stay that way until those areas are annexed by some city.

That is, unless Segale's proposal gets the serious consideration that it deserves, but is not getting, from other commissioners.

"I think that it's fair," Segale told me, while acknowledging he is taking no political risk. The Shawnee resident has no unincorporated land in his district.

"It was something I promised to work on during my campaign," Segale said, "and I'm not giving up."

Why is it fair to raise taxes on some but not others?

Segale explained it this way:

All county property owners pay for and receive benefits from the county parks and the social service network and the jail and so on. Yet only in the unincorporated areas does the county maintain roads and provide regular sheriff patrol (except under contract with some cities).

The cost is $13 million a year. And every county taxpayer foots that bill, not just the 15,000 who live in the country.

Meantime, 96 percent of the Johnson County population lives in cities, and rural residents don't help them fix

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their streets or pay their police officers' salaries.

"It's not my intention to divide the community against itself," Segale said..

But rural taxpayers shouldn't get a free ride, he said.

At Segale's request, county staffers pulled some numbers. A tax increase of $50 on every $1,000 of a property's assessed value in the unincorporated areas would be needed to collect that $13 million.

That's a huge amount. So Segale proposed a special rural levy of less than half that.

It would equal the average tax levy in Johnson County's two dozen cities, he said.

Sounds fair to me.

But so far, we've yet to hear from the unincorporated areas, except through statements made by the three county commissioners who have rural constituents.

As you can imagine, they're not happy with Segale's proposal.

But the newest commissioner has good reason to push on.

A majority of the seven-member commission have no rural constituents. And, as Segale reminded me, he has been on the job a mere five months.

"I've got four years to try to make this happen," he said.

To reach Mike Hendricks, call (816) 234-7708 or send e-mail to mhendricks@kcstar.com.