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Airport tax would bump cumulative rate

In a response to the proposal of a tax to fund the expansion of Durango-La Plata County Airport, I offer the following question: Is there anybody else in our fair community who is given pause at the number of recent public-works projects for which funding is proposed through tax increases?

Now, I may be wrong on this one, but isn’t a one-time expense such as a sewer plant or an airport terminal best funded through a bond issue? To me, it seems like tax revenue is best suited for ongoing expenses of government such as law-enforcement, courts, maintenance of city or county facilities (roads, bridges, fairgrounds, recreation) and servicing government debt. In this line of thinking, tax revenue is like the salary of the government, which must finance big things it wants to buy (such as new sewer plants or airport terminals) through getting a loan specifically for that purpose, which would be in the form of a municipal bond. This would be similar to financing the purchase of a home by using a mortgage loan, repayable over a fairly long time frame.

Forgive me for being simple. I am aware that the world of finance is Byzantine, but, at the very least, does it not make sense to require that additional taxes at some point have a date at which they will sunset, similar to the ½-cent tax recently re-approved for the maintenance and construction of new and improved recreation facilities? After which date, if these taxes are to persist, they must be re-approved through a vote of the taxed population.

Now, if a 1/3-cent sales tax is instituted for the impending airport expansion, that bumps the cumulative sales tax rate in Durango up to something that is on par with Aspen, Breckenridge or Vail. So I pose the following question to the residents of our fair valley: Do we really want that for our community? To be another sellout, plastic, soulless community inhabited by only the ultra-rich second- (or fifth-) homeowner crowd?

Josh Kane

Durango



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