The Daily Herald from Chicago, Illinois • Page 21

February 14,1997 YOUR OPINIONS Section 5 GIF Shelter taxes are unfair Of all the abominable taxes we are forced to bear, the most cruel and brutal are shelter taxes. Shelter is a fundamental, human need and it is absolutely vital to sustain life. Thus, only a corrupt predacious government, devoid of compassion, would victimize its own people with this act of tyranny. Shelter taxes are the principle utensils by which the efite aristocracy perpetuates its subjugation of middle-class people. For middle- class people, our home represents the greatest asset we will acquire in a lifetime.

Shelter taxes have driven many older people out of the homes they raised their families in. The apparatus they use to facilitate this scheme is the tax assessment process. This massive bureaucracy and its gargantuan size staggers the imagination. Anyone who makes just a cursory attempt to understand its workings will learn quickly how idiotic it really is. The sheer size of this undertaking makes it virtually impossible to produce anything but unfairness.

In order to obfuscate its inadequacies, they employ a convoluted and sinuous assortment of arcane terms. The reassessments are cleverly carried out on a widely separated, section by section basis, but never at the same time, so as to minimize public outcry. In purchasing a home, the buyer will pay tens of thousands of dollars in state and federal payroll taxes. Moreover, the price of a home built today will include an 8.25 percent sales tax on every brick, board and batten used in its construction. On top of these taxes, he will also pay the huge annual property extortion tax.

When the home is finally sold, it is then subject to a series of ad valo- rum taxes, namely, the state transfer tax, the county transfer tax and then, in many places, a village or municipal transfer tax. Alter all of these taxes have been paid, the home is subject to yet another tax, the capital gains tax. Since capital gains are not indexed to take into account the effects of inflation, we are compelled to pay capital gains taxes on phantom capital gains. At a recent assembly of the Northwest Tax Watch, our state senator, Peter Fitzgerald, made a very sad but true admission: We middle-class people have no representatives at any level of government. Robert W.

Trodke Palatine Busing money available Your front-page article on Saturday, Jan. 25, regarding hazardous crossings involving Mount Prospect District 57 children failed to disclose a very key point. District 57 could request reimbursement for busing (from the state board of education) for every child living outside the 19 hazardous crossings, but intentionally chooses not to because the state has historically inadequately funded this program. The District 57 Board of Education prefers to have parents assume this cost. When the state fails to receive reimbursement requests from a district, they may see little necessity in funding the program.

I believe Mount Prospect School District 57 has an obligation to pursue this inequity further. Richard and Carol Benson Mount Prospect Village affects all taxes Wheeling is working on next year's budget, and the cost of running the village is expected to go up again. Mr. Failkowsky, the finance manager, presented a pie graph at a recent meeting showing what portion of the taxes Wheeling residents actually pay to the village. It gave the impression that the village wasn't responsible for the majority of the tax bite residents feel.

Miscellaneous County Sewer 5.6% Harper 3.2% District 214 24.5% Park district 6.3% Library 3.3% District 21 Village Schools, library and park districts are all separate taxing bodies. So when the village says something won't affect their taxes or operating expenses, they're probably, technically, telling the truth. However, remember, the only local regulatory body that collects taxes that can substantially affect the burdens of other branches is the village. Only the village can increase densities or change zon- ings to residential from commercial and in so doing remove tax benefits to all branches and increase tax burdens to the property being changed and the entire village. Is it fair for the village to allow a staff member to point a finger at the library or park or school district? Wheeling does not need politicians who hide behind a bureaucrat trying to misdirect the public to where the expenses come from.

Nor do we need politicians who do not understand how far-reaching their actions are. It's tax time. It's election time. Get informed, get involved. Your elected officials are your employees.

You hire us you fire us. Vote April l. It's easy to remember, think politics and April Fools Day, a perfect match. Don't be the fools. Vote.

Patrick Horcher Trustee Wheeling Local school funding Recent newspaper articles reported that $13 billion of additional state funding will be needed to repair aging schools, erect new schools, and upgrade school buildings for computers. A few days earlier, I asked for and received a special report from the Illinois State Board of Education on statewide referenda results for 1994 and 1996. Those results convince me that some measurement of local taxing effort should be factored into any funding mechanism. State taxpayers should not be asked to subsidize local taxpayers unwilling to assume a reasonable share of the cost to educate their own kids. The report of the ISBE revealed that in last November's election only three of 27 (11 percent) referenda addressing local taxing passed.

Of the 28 referenda addressing construction, repairing or equipping local schools, only 13 (46 percent) passed. In the 1994 election, only 36 percent of the 43 taxing referenda passed, while 50 percent of the 24 referenda addressing the condition of local schools passed. This lack of local taxing effort has been going on for years. It has caused a grossly unfair cycle of constant reduction of state support for school districts whose taxpayers have reluctantly approved property tax increases. At the same time, these same taxpayers pay higher state income taxes to fund the extremely high per pupil funding redistributed to the school districts whose taxpayers refuse to assume responsibility for the education of their own children.

The current school-aid formula is a complex, unworkable, unfair mess that penalizes responsible taxpayers. I have no problem supporting school districts in poverty- stricken areas if at least some reasonable local effort is made to be supportive of their own school districts. But, I do have a real prob- lem subsidizing low property taxes with higher income taxes. Any equitable school funding system I would vote for must examine local assessment practices, local economic conditions, the efforts of local taxpayers to maintain a reasonable level of support for'" local schools from property taxes, the reaction of local voters to school funding referenda, etc. The practice of deliberately underfund- ing local schools from local must stop.

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