Sullivan’s Senate Campaign attacks on Begich are born in Mayor Dan Sullivan’s years of budget-political tricky business. It is important to understand how Mayor Sullivan manipulated the budget. The Anchorage Municipal Tax Cap limits the amount of taxes that can be collected every year to cover the cost of services. It is calculated by adding the amount of all taxes collected the prior year and then adjusts for inflation, population, tax on new construction, voter-approved debt service and operation and maintenance costs. Year after year, before the tax cap was set, Mayor Sullivan used millions of dollars of state money to pay for municipal expenditures that had previously been within the tax cap. This artificially lowered the cap. (In sharp contrast, Mayor Begich used that state money as direct tax rebates to taxpayers.) By lowering the tax cap, Mayor Sullivan created a deficit in the following years because the tax cap was not high enough to pay for the budgeted costs of basic, ongoing, public services.
Posted on: Sun, 02 Nov 2014 19:04:15 +0000
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