Dayton Chronicle - Your Hometown News Source

To the editor,

Columbia County residents were asked to vote to tax themselves to fund a library. Dayton City residents asked to join this taxing entity. The votes passed.

County residents became dissatisfied with the way their tax dollars were being spent. A petition was circulated to call for a vote to dissolve the taxing entity.

Obviously, the vote to dissolve would have failed, since the vote to form, in the first place, passed easily. Voting to spend someone else's money is always an easy sell. But county residents like to hang onto the illusion that they have some say in what their tax dollars buy. The county voted to tax themselves; the county should be allowed to vote to un-tax themselves. Had city residents left well enough alone, there would have been no furor.

It is astonishing that there apparently is such a thing as a "court commissioner" with the power to decree, without examining any evidence, that the petition was illegal, and that county residents shall not be allowed to vote to un-tax themselves.

County residents have been disenfranchised by being deprived of the right to vote on how their tax dollars shall be spent. City residents have not been disenfranchised; if the county were to vote to un-tax themselves, the city would be un-taxed as well. If the city still wanted what the county didn't want, then the city would have the right to find some other taxing entity to join.

It has been suggested that property taxes would not be lower if the library district were dissolved. Such a suggestion is baloney. Right there on my annual tax sheet is a statement saying how much of my money goes to the library.

Dumb farmer though I am, I am not so stupid as to let that statement go unchallenged if there were no longer a library.

Jim Thorn

Dayton, Wash.