Candidates spar over tax claims
Fowler says Peggy Mast encouraged higher taxes
By Scott Rochat
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
A campaign mailing portraying Rep. Peggy Mast as an anti-tax crusader has been criticized as inaccurate by her Democratic opponent, Susan Fowler.
The mailing says Mast, an Emporia Republican, has held the line on new taxes and worked to lower the tax burden on Kansas families. Fowler, however, claims that some of Mast’s votes ultimately resulted in large increases in local property taxes.
“This is how certain legislators have handled tax increases so they can say ‘We didn’t raise it,’” Fowler said. “But it’s the legislation they passed that made it happen.”
Mast defended the mailing, saying she had not supported any new state taxes while in the Legislature and that her record showed it.
“Having received a rating of 96.4 percent with the Kansas Taxpayers Network, I think that’s evidence enough that I have not been a proponent of increasing taxes,” Mast said.
The two are competing for the 76th House District seat, which covers parts of Lyon, Coffey and Greenwood counties.
In one instance cited by Fowler, House Bill 2247, school districts had the option to raise local property taxes to pay for education. Opponents of the bill claimed that it had a $400 million impact on local taxes while defenders said it left the choice of taxation to local school districts. Mast voted for the bill, which failed a review by the Kansas Supreme Court.
“That was a very, very emotional issue,” Mast said.
To get the needed votes, she said, legislators had to accommodate Johnson County representatives who wanted to be able to raise additional local tax dollars for their own schools.
Similar bargaining arose with House Bill 2474, also cited by Fowler, which proposed increasing the basic per-student state aid along with at-risk and bilingual funding without a state tax increase. As with the other bill, it would have permitted local property taxes to be raised and allowed school districts with a high cost of living — again, such as Johnson County — to raise still more funds to attract teachers.
“We allowed local governments the option of higher taxes, but that was a decision the locals could make, not the state,” Mast said. “It was local control.”
Fowler considers that disingenuous. Most localities, she said, would have had to raise their local property taxes significantly to make up their needed education funding under the bill.
“When you say, ‘It’s up to the local government to do that,’ you have to know what you’re asking,” Fowler said. “If you talk to the school districts, what choice did they have?”
Some of the cases cited by Fowler were referred to by Mast as “Christmas tree amendments,” or proposals with no chance of passage that were piled onto a bill.
“Gradually, it topples over, because it’s too weighted,” Mast said.
That included such things as a proposal by Rep. Harold Lane, D-Topeka, to allow some residential property to be exempt from property taxes, bundled into a bill on microbreweries. Both Mast and another Emporia representative, Don Hill, voted against the amendment, which had little to do with the main bill.