POLICY DIFFUSION?

Montgomery and Howard county anti-tax activists are pushing for ballot initiatives to limit property taxes. Read "Maryland Activists Push for Tax Caps," from Sunday's WaPo. One part of the article caught my eye:

Maryland Del. Howard P. Rawlings (D-Baltimore) said he and Del. Sheila Ellis Hixson, a Democrat from Montgomery who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, will probably introduce legislation when the General Assembly reconvenes in January to allow county councils to override the caps. The two introduced similar legislation this year, but it died in committee.

"The state has an interest when we support [giving] hundreds of millions of dollars to local governments, so we certainly want to look at their effort to address their own financial needs," said Rawlings, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee.

Much of legislators' frustration is focused on the Tax Reform Initiative by Marylanders ballot question that Prince George's County voters approved in 1978.

Many local officials have blamed the initiative, which caps the county property-tax rate at 96 cents per $100 of assessed value, for a weakened bond rating and the school system's financial distress.

"We have tremendous problems because of the tax cap," said Peter A. Shapiro (D-Brentwood), chairman of the Prince George's County Council. "At the most basic level, we have tremendous lack of financial flexibility."

Prince George's Executive Jack B. Johnson (D) has hinted that he wants to eliminate the initiative, although voters upheld it in 1996.

I don't know anything about the legal and political issues involved in state overrides of county caps such as the one instituted in Prince Georges County in 1978, but it's an interesting question.

And I had no idea that PG had a property tax cap in place. In a recent argument I had with our neighborhood anti-tax signature collector in front of the local grocery store, he didn't bother to mention that his drive is part of a process of policy diffusion from PG, probably because it wouldn't help his case in Montgomery County, which has a kind of subtle but racially and economically tinged rivalry with PG.

For comments in support of the tax cap, read this post at The Hedgehog Report. Suffice it to say that I don't agree with Hedgehog's take. One of the good things about living in Montgomery County is that there are excellent public schools, a good infrastructure, and excellent public transportation. If you want all of these things (the attributes of modern government, it seems to me), then you have to pay for them.