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Everything you need to know about Kansas politics!
Bi-State III looms just over the horizon. As soon as Mid-America Regional Council (MARC) gets their legislative proposal to the Kansas legislature. Here’s what I think.
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Press Release – Tuesday, November 22, 2005 – For immediate release
Contact: Wayne Flaherty, Kansans Against Bi-State – (913)-831-2140
You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!
If you think the new Johnson County tax bills are shocking, wait until you see what the MARC, the Mid-America Regional Council, has in store for you! The hike in your property tax bill will range from a high of 27.7% in Westwood to a low of 2.8% in DeSoto. The cost of living in a quality county has just gone up but the cost of living in the region will go up again if MARC has its way.
For several months I and others have been hounding MARC for a copy of the legislative proposal they are preparing to submit to the Kansas legislature. MARC representatives have repeatedly stated that the legislative proposal is not ready for public viewing since no legislative proposal exists. I can now tell you with absolute certainty that a draft copy does exist and has existed for several months. When you see it, you will understand why they don’t want anyone to get a look at it. Apparently their plan is to not have the legislative proposal available for the public until they present it to the legislature.
The just completed series of public meetings gave no indication of what MARC really has in store for Johnson County. The proposed legislation they have creates a “regional investment district” for the purpose of creating a “regional program” that includes a “public transit system” and, if they decide they want it, trails and traffic management.
The district is defined as including Clay, Platte, Jackson, Cass, and Ray counties in Missouri along with Wyandotte, Johnson, and Leavenworth in Kansas. The catch 22 is that they have no intention of requiring that all the counties (or even the major urban counties of Jackson, Clay, Johnson, and Wyandotte) vote for the sales tax they propose to pay for their grand plans. As with Bi-State II, MARC wants to require only Jackson and Johnson counties to approve for the tax to be enacted. This purely political move is a tactic designed to allow MARC to spend your tax money to promote their plan almost entirely in Johnson County. It’s a lot easier to concentrate on one county than to sell it to all the regional counties. Strategically, this provides the opportunity to create a so-called regional program with six of the eight regional counties on the outside looking in.
A new twist is that in order to pass the tax, their legislative proposal says the commission may decide that the entire county need not vote in favor of the tax for it to be enacted. The commission may decide which portion of a county must vote for the tax to enact it. To gerrymander portions of a county as a way of insuring passage of a tax is unconscionable. This effort to disenfranchise every voter outside what they call the “urbanized areas” is sheer hypocrisy. Obviously, it is designed to keep people in the rural areas from having anything to say about a proposed tax they will be forced to pay.
Their legislative proposal also creates a “commission” similar to the commission created by Bi-State I for overseeing Union Station renovation. Like the Bi-State I commission, which still exists, and is still spending your tax money, the new commission would never go away. One thing is different. The commission members must be “voting members of the Mid-America Regional Council”.
Most revealing is that no official of this regional government body is elected. There is no accountability to the taxpayers who foot the bill. They may have to tell you what they did with your money, but, if you don’t like it, there is nothing you can do about it. I personally heard a MARC employee say, in a public meeting, “MARC wants to run the regional transit system.” Currently set to run the KCMO Head Start program, MARC has magically transformed itself from an advisory organization to another government agency determined to spend your tax money.
The Numbers Game
MARC is proposing a ½ cent sales tax to support their $155 million per year operating and capital costs for the regional transit system. Set to run for 10 years, the tax would have to be renewed continuously to keep the system running since no transit system in the world except a handful of major cities like Tokyo and New York, carries more than 2 or 3 percent of local travelers. While $1.5 billion dollars sounds like a lot of money, it is not much in the transit business. Denver, Colorado just completed a 19 mile light rail line with a road beside it at a total cost of $2.1 billion. At that rate, your ten years of sales tax money will only build a rail line and road 14 miles long – not enough to get from Olathe to Union Station. Taxpayers in Seattle just voted to end the Seattle Monorail Project when it was revealed that the total cost for the project (after financing) would have been $11 billion for the 14 mile line. Had it been built, the cost would have been an astounding $786 million per mile.
Around the nation, light rail costs have risen from $40 million per mile 15 years ago to $60 to $70 million per mile. As large as that number is, it is not the bottom line cost the taxpayers will have to pay. Ask proponents of giant transit plans about the other costs of financing, staffing, maintenance, security, and liability insurance. One Tennessee transit line planned for $155, 000 per year for liability insurance but got a bill for $600,000. Increasing fuel costs are wreaking havoc on transit budgets all across the country.
Time is of the essence since MARC plans to present their legislative proposal to the Kansas legislature in the January 2006 session, just six weeks away. What you are faced with as a tax paying citizen of Johnson County will be determined by the nature of the statute that actually becomes law.
From a purely financial point of view and to protect our rights, it is imperative that we all be given the opportunity to see what the big planners have in store for us. If you want to see a copy of MARC’s legislative proposal, call the office of MARC Executive Director, David Warm at 816-474-4240 and request a copy.
Someone once said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
Good luck and be vigilant.
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