Paulding.com -> SCHOOL SPLOST PASS IN LANDSLIDE
Once again, people are willing to pass a tax on themselves as long as it is “for the kids”. Don’t get me wrong. I want to have money for schools, and teachers, and books, but I am not sure getting in the habit of always having a max’d out sales tax in the county is a good thing. For large purchases, people consider deliberately not buying something in Paulding county when they can just go over to Cobb county and pay 2% less. Ultimately I think the extra taxes hurt businesses in Paulding county. The need for this money is the result of attracting plenty of residents to the county but not enough businesses. Cobb county has a slightly lower but similar property tax rate and they have only a 5% sales tax rate. They also have had tremendous growth in the county like Paulding has. Yet, they haven’t jacked the sales tax up. Why? Because they get plenty of revenue off of the businesses in the county. My real problem is this continuous pattern of keeping the optional sales tax up. It gets the local government in the habit of always getting that extra money. Yet if you vote no, you are accused of simply being “against the children or education”.
But here is the sneaky part of this vote. It was a special election with only one item on the ballot. Nobody talked about it. Nobody new about it. Where are most of the polling places in the county? At schools! So certainly the teachers knew about it. And then you also get the parents of the children when they drop off their kids. So the very thing that would benefit from the vote is where the vote is held. Sort of violates the whole campaigning at polling places laws doesn’t it? Then you top that off with at least two of the schools in the county that are polling places also having Book Fairs that night at the school. The theme for the Book Fair at our polling place and local elementary school was “Vote For Books” with said slogan on signs up and down the hall — a hall you have to walk down to get to the voting area which was moved this time (because of the book fair) to the library! This was designed from day one to pass like this. If they thought it was such a great idea, just put on the regular ballot in November. Let everyone in the county decide how they want to be taxed and how the local government spends its money instead of sneaking it through.