From the Roundtable: Could city budget shortfall lead to new taxes?

The numbers swim and dance before us in the most strenuous tome of the late summer — the 600-page budget for the city of Columbia.
It’s certainly not a selection for the library’s One Read community reading program.
The proposed fiscal 2010-2011 budget includes an occasional nip about funds squirreled away in various untouchable accounts, balanced against the anxiety to keep the columns balanced.
Very few of us have the tools to understand what’s really going on.
 The one broad understanding is that there is a growing shortfall between receipts and expenditures, which is a problem not only in our city but also in virtually every government as the economy struggles out of the recession.
We’ve grown accustomed to spending more than we take in. The solution — to corral expenses and/or increase revenues — inevitably brings on the discussion of tax increases. The city tells us the budget under discussion will be a tough one to arbitrate, and matters won’t improve much as we move toward the “teens” of the present decade.
Short of coming up with any new, reliable revenue streams, the city manager, mayor and City Council must craft a budget laced with cuts while maintaining the fundamental services cities are historically constituted to provide.
The dilemma brings forth memories of 40 years ago, when Columbia was a recently designated standard metropolitan area of 58,804 residents and faced financial stresses leading to the eventual enactment of a sales tax to fund operations.
Thinking forward makes us wonder what new sources of revenue city officials might be conjuring up their collective sleeves. With overwhelming popular support for maintaining fire station staffing while augmenting law enforcement activities, could those in charge be considering an additional dedicated sales tax to fund these essential services and replicate what’s been accepted in Boone County?
Brace yourself — and I hope it doesn’t come true; the real pot o’ gold for the city’s coffers might be an earnings tax.
Let’s hope Columbia steers clear of this, but you’ve been warned. E-taxes go back to the early 1940s in Philadelphia and in other major cities. I remember Colorado years ago called a similar levy the “occupational privilege tax,” perhaps denoting the privilege of gazing at snowcapped mountains through Denver’s legendary “brown cloud.”
You must have lived elsewhere part of your life to fully appreciate this, but with relatively low tax obligations, the greater Columbia area is a pretty darned inexpensive place to live.
Comparing notes with folks from out of town or probing around the real estate listings in some distant city provides ample proof of how good we have it when it comes to the taxes we remit annually to the troika of taxing entities within Missouri. Perhaps we should tout this more. If the lower cost of living hereabouts were more widely known, I bet this area would really boom with refugees from areas where the levies are downright onerous.
Spending by these new residents would boost sales taxes. This would be advantageous if growth-management expenses could be maintained beneath the anticipated increase in sales tax receipts. My, my! Something more for the no-growth crowd to scream about!