CCM to Malloy: Send Your Car Tax Plan to the Scrap Heap ...
http://patch.com/connecticut/hamden/ccm-to-malloy-send-your-car-tax-plan-to-the-scrap-heap-e87e1090
The Connecticut
Conference of Municipalities gathered city leaders at the capitol last week to
protest the governor's proposal to eliminate the car tax on vehicles worth
$28,000 and less.
By Eileen McNamara (Patch Staff) March 24, 2013 at 5:17pm
Municipal leaders converged on the state capitol last week
to protest Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s plan to eliminate
town car taxes, a proposal leaders of cities and small towns alike have said
could result in higher property taxes locally.
“I think the governor’s proposal is dead on arrival,” Jim
Finley, chief lobbyist for the Connecticut
Conference of Municipalities , told the blog Capitol Watch. “There are no
votes for it.”
CCM organized a gathering Wednesday at the capitol,
getting mayors and employees of many of Connecticut’s cities to turn out and
protest Malloy’s proposal for an across-the-board elimination of the car tax on
vehicles assessed at less than $28,000.
The plan, Malloy has said, is intended to provide
middle-class tax relief to Connecticut
residents.
But mayors, town managers and first selectmen of financially
strapped municipalities, both big and small, from across Connecticut have
collectively panned the idea, saying it will cost communities millions of
dollars in much-needed tax revenues that would have to be up somewhere else,
probably in local real estate taxes.
Municipal leaders have said Malloy’s proposal comes at a bad
time for communities that are still trying to recoup revenues lost by declining
grand list property values after the Great Recession.
“I don’t know what the governor’s motivation was,” Finley
told the blog. “I’ll take him at his word that he wanted to provide direct
property tax relief to car owners. But it comes at a terrible cost to
municipalities.”