No Vote On The Quarter-Cent
Not in November at the polls; not even Tuesday night by commissioners, when George Dunlap’s motion to put a quarter-cent sales tax up for referendum didn’t even draw a second, much less any debate.
But that didn’t prevent Dunlap, a Democrat, from rambling for nearly 10 minutes explaining why he didn’t necessarily support a new tax, but thought it was important to give voters the option to support one in November.
More than anything, Tuesday night gave Dunlap a chance to cater to his gerrymandered district base, while giving the at-large Democrat candidates a chance, through their rebuff of his sales-tax pitch, to build some dummied-up bonafides on their fiscal conservatism.
Dunlap scolded his fellow commissioners, both Democrats and Republicans, for authorizing over the last 10 years more than $1 billion in non-voter approved debt that “did not give one citizen an opportunity to have a say.” He similarly chided the media for misrepresenting both his views on the proposed sales tax and its impact on citizens’ wallets, which he implied would be nominal.
In a take off the old “nothing more than a bag of fries” argument, Dunlap said that a quarter-cent would only be, well, a quarter-cent, or 2.5-cents on a $10 purchase.
What Dunlap forgot to mention is that those quarter-cents add up and that Mecklenburg County already has the state’s highest sales tax, rolling in at 8.25 percent. Dunlap doesn’t seem to have any problems adding more to that burden, or at least trying to dupe enough voters into thinking it would be in their own best interest.
“There’s never a wrong time to do the right thing,” he said. “I believe the right thing is to give citizens the opportunity to have their say.”
They’ll have it in November; with any luck, they’ll use it to give Dunlap the boot.
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