A Bad Idea Deservedly Bites the Dust

Monday afternoon in the state Capitol, a very bad piece of legislation died a very quick death on the floor of the state Senate. And our reaction can be summed up in two words: good riddance.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, when he was running for election in 2005, made a promise to voters in Northern Virginia and Tidewater that sent cold shudders down the spines of local government officials across the commonwealth. Trolling for votes in the populous regions where home values were rising through the roofs (and property taxes with them), Kaine promised that, if elected, he would make it a top priority of his to amend the state constitution to allow local governments to exempt 20 percent of a home’s value from local taxes.

True to his word, the new governor and his supporters in the General Assembly successfully pushed the proposed amendment through House of Delegates and Senate in 2007. The state’s constitution requires amendments be passed by two successive Assembly sessions with an election in between them before voters could have the final say. Approval in the 2008 session was all that stood between the amendment and voters.

This session, the amendment sailed through the House on Jan. 30 on a 99-0 vote. The Committee on Privileges and Elections sent the legislation to the Senate floor Feb. 19 on a 14-1 vote where it died Monday on a 21-19 vote. (Two Democrats defected, joining 19 Republicans to put a stake through the proposal.)

Senate Democrats and the governor’s office attempted to spin the legislative defeat as a petty attempt by the minority Republicans in the Senate to embarrass the Democratic chief executive, citing party-line votes on Kaine’s budget in the Senate as evidence of some dark plot on the part of the GOP.

Think of that … politics being behind a vote in the General Assembly. Whoever heard of such a thing?

Regardless, the result was that an ill-conceived amendment to the state constitution, formulated in the heat of a gubernatorial election and designed to result in a few votes, is essentially dead and buried.

Had voters approved the constitutional amendment, local governments across the commonwealth would have been under the gun from residents to enact the 20 percent exemption, with dire consequences looming on horizon.

Honestly, there could have only been two possible outcomes: (1) Businesses, both large and small, would have seen their tax rates go through the stratosphere along with a host of other fees imposed on every resident of the locality or (2) stripped of 20 percent of the money that primarily pays for public school and other budget items, there would have been financial chaos across the state.

And would Richmond have cared? What do you think?

Gov. Kaine should have known better, as he and then-Gov. Mark Warner came into office in 2001 on the heels of Republican Jim Gilmore’s politically inspired (and equally fiscally irresponsible) car tax cut. That ill-advised piece of legislation was born in the 1997 election, out of the same muck as Kaine’s homestead exemption: the crass desire to troll for votes.

Political leaders owe citizens a government that operates in a fiscally sound, efficient manner. As Sen. Kenneth W. Stolle, a Republican from Virginia Beach, observed, both parties had abused this measure for political gain.

As the senator told The Associated Press, there’s already a process for citizens to petition their local boards if they think taxes are too high. It’s called an election.