SAME OLD TAX NEWS

The latest news on the latest report on Maine’s economy will sound painfully familiar to anyone paying even the slightest attention to state politics. Maine’s best hope is that these repetitive reviews become painful enough to voters that they insist lawmakers do something about them if only to keep the economists from describing the same shortcomings year after year.

In brief:

. Maine’s tax system is a relic of the past industrial age, relying too heavily on property and business-equipment taxes.

. Maine’s 489 communities do not cooperate enough, producing costly duplication.

. Maine residents need increased access to high education, through a community college system.

The Economic Development Council of Maine has many more suggestions, but these are some of the biggest, and, unfortunately, they are some of the most well-known, with the tax problem leading the list. But to begin with the easiest, the new chancellor for the University of Maine System, Joseph Westphal noticed the access difficulties in Maine almost immediately and already is working on getting detailed information on how the system’s universities, centers and sites, along with the technical college system provide access to students to determine whether an additional bricks-and-mortar community college system is needed. Chancellor Westphal’s report will be one of several studies on the question in recent years, with the previous work concluding that number of places Maine students can go currently is sufficient. Whatever the outcome of this new study, it will have been worth doing only if it provides a means for many more nontraditional students to obtain a college degree.

On the inefficiencies of having so many small town governments, the extended debates on regional dispatch centers for emergency services suggest how far Maine is from doing anything serious about this problem. For further proof, recall State Planning Director Evan Richert’s brave but unsuccessful attempt to boost county-level government as a way for municipalities to share administrative burdens. Turned out the locals preferred to hold onto their own troubles rather than having to share both them and their neighbor’s.

The council’s comments on Maine’s archaic tax system come about eight weeks late, not that they would likely have been heeded at that time when lawmakers were reviewing a tax reform that would have accomplished approximately what this latest report recommends. Sen. Peter Mills and Rep. Barney McGowan led legislators last summer and fall through a detailed review of the faults in the current tax system and devised a steep drop in property taxes, elimination of business equipment excise tax and a significant broadening of Maine’s sales tax. Though the plan wasn’t wholly assembled, it showed promise of bringing Maine out of the 1940s into somewhere around the late ’80s, early ’90s.

This was apparently way too modern for most lawmakers, who skinnied up the sales-tax base a bit and killed the reform plan. They should not have, and voters who have had enough of a tax system that still measures wealth by the acre should know that most of the lawmakers who voted against the one chance for reform will be looking for votes of their own in November.

If this proposal was too flawed to be saved, voters should demand one from their local representatives and senators that would have done as much, one that more fairly funded schools, as the defeated plan did, as relied more on tourist dollars and less on resident dollars. It ended the fight over taxes on business equipment and recognized that services have become as important a product as a boat or a board. It is fair to say that lawmakers weren’t finished with several portions of this reform and equally fair to say that they had nothing better to propose.

So for voters and lawmakers alike a key question before November is whether legislators are willing to pick up where the last session left off; improve this tax reform; make the numbers add up and try to get it passed next year. Remove the obligation, that is, for the next economic report to point out just how broken Maine’s tax system has become.