CHC 1979-03-13 - Laserfiche WebLink

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MR. CADINHA: So then your recommendation would be then to caveat any spending limits or real property tax limits with the council having the authority to ignore or disregard limits if the situation is such. Is that correct? MR. MOSS: I don ' t know whether you'd put it on all three of those. You ' ll notice we went at this three ways. We said the general fund shouldn ' t rise any faster than the economy. And number two, we tried to put a limit on the debt limit but not a fixed limit. We didn ' t say $40 million.. You know, the national government has a debt limit in a certain number of millions , or billions , or trillions of dollars. I don ' t know what it is but about every 4 years, or every 2 years , Congress has to pass a law that changes that debt limit because it isn' t sliding. . .It isn ' t sliding. You' ll notice all of these have been made contingent on a sliding scale.0 As the economy grows , the general fund budget can grow and the debt limit can grow. But they can ' t grow skyhigh in any one time. This is what we are trying to do. Now, those two possibly you put in a two-thirds vote of the council and you can hold it up temporarily, in case of an emergency or something. But the property tax is something else again. It seems to me that is the thing that should be pretty well nailed down. And, incidentally, the last time the Council Chairman, Mr. Yamashiro, was over . to Kona to talk to us he mentioned that in this business of the county ' s taking over the real property assessment, that they were thinking very seriously of, just this kind of approach. Now, I don' t know whether it belongs .there or it belongs in the charter. Person- ally, I think it belongs in the charter but maybe your State Constitution will override the County Charter and maybe he is right , maybe it should be this inter-county agreement of how they are going to tax real property. Right now, I 'd like to see it in the charter, myself. MR. CADINHA: They are all interrelated though. The county budget is directly related to therpmount of tax revenues that we have. If you have ceilings on one it ultimately affects the other.. .If you are starting with the taxation picture. And I agree in concept that if my family had been on a piece of property and I was third generation and some sheik ; flew in from the middle east and paid ten tenfOlat,if6rtiWproperty next door that my taxes would be based on what he paid for the land , that ' s not fair. I understand that. My concern, though, is that there is too much discrimination against the newcomers , potentially, and then if we do not have an increase in value and we have an economically depressing state such as in the ' 30 ' s or something. Maybe not that bad , but you could have prert+tyvr wide swings in some of these values from the property rates , today. If you've got ceilings on it you could find yourself in aP trying roblem. I 'm tr in to reconcile these things in my mind also. MR. MOSS: In the County Handbook there is a pretty good rundowno the increase in assessed value of property in the county. It h'as been rising right along pretty steadily. I agree with you, you may see the ' 30 ' s again sometime but it certainly doesn ' t look it: from past history. As I said, all of these limits that we proposed; : . we tried to make it so that we didn 't cause any drastic changes - - 19 -