Sales Tax Hike Proposed (Again)

August 18, 2005

By Bump Diamond
Man About Town

    Mammoth town council member Kirk Stapp, freaked out over requests for public dough and with the town having nowhere close to enough money to match them, last night again proposed to take a sales tax hike to the voters.
    It was the second time within a year that Stapp has made a push for the tax hike. Mammoth's current sales tax is 7.25 percent. He said a five percent hike would raise $1.5 million a year.
    Stapp's first initiative, which would have placed the tax proposal on this October's ballot, never got off the ground. That initiative was aimed toward providing funds for a wide-ranging array of services and utilities, from funding a recreational center to providing money for child care.
    Stapp's new proposal is called the "Community Services Initiative" and he characterized it as a "scaled down" version of the first one.
     "We can begin to address issues before they get to crisis stage," he said.
    Stapp did not say by how much he would recommend raising the sales tax, but councilman Skip Harvey recommended a hike of .75 percent or even as much as .8 percent.
    "If we're going to do it," Harvey said, "let's make sure we don't have to do it again anytime soon."
    In the current proposal, which is still at the discussion stage insofar as the Town Council is concerned, Stapp said such things as child care, the library and police emergency dispatch services would be covered.
    Stapp blamed the media coverage—or lack of it—for the first proposal's failure to generate heat, and said he'd be disinclined to repeat the experience unless the town funded an "educational campaign" before a vote.