Well, I have been pondering the logic of making my wife and I participate in this community's EIT "repayment program."
The logic goes, so I was told by local public officials, is that she and I now benefit from the infrastructure investments that these officials spent the EIT revenue on, so we should help "pay for it." So, under that logic, I think she and I, and any other current resident that was NOT living here during the "EIT Overpayment" years should be able to either get a rebate back from the municipalities in which we WERE living back in, oh, say 2004, 2005, 2006, etc,. Or, we at least should be able to offset our current "burden" here by what we paid to those municipalities years ago. Afterall, we are no longer able to enjoy the "infrastructure" benefits that those other municipalities spent our previous contributions on.
Since our EIT-equivalent contribution to Philly in the last year alone that we lived there exceeded $12,000, I would certainly be ok with our offset...It seems only fair.
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3 comments:
good idea! just pay for the years lived here?
The Gretna newsletter says the suggestion is to pay the EIT over-payment off over 20 years. What do you think? It was in the Lebanon newspaper.
What do "I" think? I think that there is no legal or factual basis for any repayment--whether its over 20 seconds or over 20 years. I think that the persons "negotiating" a term of "repayment" here have involved themselves so inappropriately, unprofessionally,and unethically that I am apalled at my neighbors'(their consituents') apathy and silence--silence that allows the "players" to continue to even discuss this issue.
Let's say that the IRS decided that you could only gift $10,000 a year tax free from now on, only they are also going to go back to 2004 and ask everyone to pay taxes on any gift over $10,000 but under $13,000 (the tax-free limit back then). That just doesn't happen--whatever manner in which they were administering that tax back then is set--they can't change their own policy and go back and readjust things so that their previous years' administration of that tax rule complies with an admittedly new administrative rule.
And, that's exactly what these guys here want you to believe--they admit that their policy alloted Mt. Gretna .35% of the EIT revenue; their own review of data shows that that is exactly what Mt. Gretna got; and they admit that they currently changed their distribution policy FROM the fixed percentage to a "payment-based" plan. And they want us to go back and adjust our payments to that new policy.
And, they want you to believe that historically, Mt. Gretna had a much larger demographic base that included a year round resident population that, relative to other municipalities in Mt. Gretna, was MUCH larger than it has been for the last 5 or 6 years. They are saying that decades ago we had a demographic pool of income earning residents that paid in 160K a year (and deserved 80K, in 2005 dollars) but that since those decades that pool of resident income earners dropped drastically--to almost a third of what we had three decades or so ago, so that we now only pay in 60K and therefore only deserved 30K.
Now does that sound correct to you--I mean really, is it really Mt. Gretna's commonly accepted history that we have gone, over the last few decades, from more full-time residents to around a third less full-time residents? I have always been told that that is exactly the opposite of what Mt. Gretna has experienced over the last fifty years, and, in reality, our numbers of full-time (and income earning) residents has really only gone up. And even if there was some year to year fluctuation, did we really lose, over the last thirty or forty years, two thirds of our income earning residents. I don't think so. So, it seems more likely that, as the EIT Bureau itself admits, that there were fixed percentages assigned to us within the system and that that's the way it was. Ergo, we did nothing wrong by accepting .35%--as that was the policy.
And, as I mentioned above, even if you change your tax policy today, you can't apply it retroactively and demand a "repayment."
By the way, there is some constitutional thing about creating new statutes and how you can't apply them retroactively--call me crazy, but our solicitor is absolutely not appearing to make any of the glaringly apparent legal arguments that should be being made on this issue. Which means for me that his representation of the opposing parties represents a ethical problem for him in that he is proving himself incapable of materially representing our Borough. As our tax collector said to me several months ago, "Kilgore is one of us." And that may be too much for him--it may be that he has relied too much on his friendly relationships and not enough on his client relationships--i.e. he is not acting as a legal professional, but as a decades old buddy.
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