OPINION: Taking back tax relief would be a raw deal

The phone rings a month later.

It’s the restaurant.

“That coupon for the steak you had last month is no longer valid,” the voice says. “We need you to pay for that meat immediately.”

“But y’all offered the coupon to me,” you say, remembering the toughness of the sirloin. “I’m sorry, but I paid you in full before I left that night.”

“Yeah, but we’re hurting pretty bad financially and we need to take the coupon back,” the voice says. “You see, we didn’t budget enough for steak. We shouldn’t have issued those coupons. Now, how would you like to pay? We take Mastercard and Visa.”

You make a counter offer to return the steak.

“Just pay up, or we’ll have to take legal action.”

Click.

An absurd scenario, of course, and yes, I’m probably going a little far with a somewhat juvenile analogy.

Nevertheless, this is honestly what I picture when I think of Gov. Sonny Perdue’s proposal to strip the Homestead Tax Relief Grant from 2008 tax bills.

The state asking homeowners to give back the homestead break is like a business asking you to cough up dough for that coupon they gave you last year.

Madison County homeowners just got hit with their 2008 tax bills. Now, they could get an additional bill of roughly $240 if the Georgia General Assembly approves Perdue’s plan to take back the annual tax grant for 2008, a tax break that has been granted to homeowners since the Barnes administration.

No doubt, the state government is in a financial pickle — the kind of pickle that has been dropped behind the counter and rediscovered months later with a horrifying Blagojevich hairdo.

But if the state wants to take away the homestead tax relief, then do it for 2009. Don’t do it retroactively. Taxpayers deserve the courtesy of preparing for the bigger bill, such as adjusting their escrow account to accommodate the change.

Here is the logical and appropriate reaction to everything I just said:

“Well, all right big shot, what do they cut and from whom?”

Yes, that’s the $2 billion question.

Where exactly is Georgia’s “bridge to nowhere?” Is it in some south Georgia peanut field? Well, no.

I’ve sat through enough local budget meetings to know that the big, easy solutions to government financial problems are hard to find. But the elimination of the credit is a major swing of the hatchet. It will eliminate over 20 percent of the state shortfall this year, adding roughly $428 million to budget revenues.

But any swing of the hatchet is a bloody mess. And the state General Assembly is gearing up for a bloody fight on the tax matter.

According to a report Tuesday by Dick Pettys of The Fayette Daily News, “Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers declared Monday that lawmakers ‘will stay here as long as we need to’ to reinstate — at least for this year — the homeowners’ tax relief grant that local governments say they need to avoid local property tax hikes.”

“Georgia taxpayers are having a tough time right now,” Rogers told reporters. “We’ve got to make sure we don’t add to their misery.”

Yes, with the state of the economy, maybe those homestead tax “coupons” must be scrapped for 2009 and beyond. There may not be much choice.

But it’s right to be sizzling mad about forking over a couple of hundred dollars for last year’s broken promise.

Zach Mitcham is editor of The Madison County Journal.