A cynical effort to exclude a public vote to form a special taxing district blows up in the face of Columbia, Missouri, businesses
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When Kansas City leaders formed a narrowly proscribed transportation-development district in downtown to move a 2-mile streetcar line ahead, the term “gerrymandering” came to mind.
Streetcar boosters figured that a citywide vote wouldn’t view a 2-mile rail plan favorably, so a district was formed in an area where it was likely to pass.
If anyone thought the process was unfair, and some do, they should check out what’s going down in Columbia, Missouri, where a similar effort seeks to exclude voters altogether.
A story out this week in the Columbia Tribune describes how the Business Loop 70 Community Improvement District wanted to increase the sales-tax rate along a main thoroughfare in the central Missouri college town.
CIDs, like TDDs, can raise sales taxes or levy property-tax assessments (or both) along a defined area. The CID or TDD then uses that increased tax rate for itself, often to make improvements of one type or another within the district.
In the case of the Business Loop 70 CID, they didn’t want pesky voters weighing in on their plan to drum up extra tax money for the benefit of its businesses. So they took out a marker and drew its boundaries very carefully, so as to exclude any eligible voters within the district.
But they weren’t careful enough.
It turns out that they overlooked one college student living within that district. Which means that there will be an election on whether to form the CID. And one 23-year-old student has all the say.
Business Loop 70 leaders tried to get Jen Henderson to unregister herself as an eligible voter, a move that the newspaper says made her only more skeptical of the plan.
“The district plan and the district border is manipulative, too,” she told the Columbia Tribune.
Hopefully some Missouri legislators are paying attention to this.
