Captain's Quarters Blog


« Qureia: We Want One Middle-East State | Main | Clues For The Clueless »

January 9, 2004
And Escape Dean's Paradise?

A border town in Vermont wants to change addresses:

Officials in the popular ski resort area of Killington want the town to secede from Vermont and join neighboring New Hampshire in a dispute over taxes. They say the town's restaurants, inns and other businesses send $10 million a year to the state capital in sales, room and meal taxes, but the state returns just $1 million in state aid to Killington.

Even more galling to the town is a statewide property tax imposed in 1997 to fund schools. The town of 1,092 won a Superior Court order that called the state's method of assessing local properties "arbitrary and capricious," but the state Supreme Court reversed that decision.

After twelve years of Dean's administration and tax policy, the town of Killington is so fed up they'd rather be annexed to New Hampshire. Not much chance of that, according to Vermont's Secretary of State:

Secretary of State Deborah Markowitz said Killington has little chance of secession "absent an armed insurrection type of thing. ... A town is a construction of the state and exists at the pleasure of the Legislature."

Yes, it's just that attitude towards local control in Vermont that makes the town of Killington so desirous of leaving it. I wonder what a Dean presidency would mean -- maybe another one of those embarassing incidents involving guys with Confederate flags on their pickups, petitioning for their home states to leave the country. Oh, let's hope not...

UPDATE: Blogs for Bush has a lot more detail on the tax that is "killing Killington," as they put it.

Sphere It Digg! View blog reactions
Posted by Ed Morrissey at January 9, 2004 11:03 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry is



Design & Skinning by:
m2 web studios





blog advertising



button1.jpg

Proud Ex-Pat Member of the Bear Flag League!