LOCAL ANGLES: LOOKING FOR EASY SOLUTIONS WHERE NONE EXIST

To Cape Girardeau residents troubled by ever-rising trash fees, a one-eighth cent sales tax to fund solid waste services might seem a good idea. It's not.

At issue is whether to raise monthly residential trash fees from $10.54 per household to $12.13. The fee hike was proposed last year, but has been put on hold while a citizens group has studied volume-based trash billing and other aspects of solid waste service.

Since January, the city has been running a revenue deficit of $14,000 each month the council ducks the inevitable trash-fee increase. One reason the hike has been delayed is to give private trash companies an opportunity to bid on the city's residential solid waste service. Those bids now are in, and they're much higher than the city's own proposed $12.13 per month.

Despite the contention of unhappy residents and some elected officials that the city's solid waste program is wasteful, the bids show that citizens are getting a pretty good deal for their money. That's been the contention of city officials from the start, and they do doubt thought the bid-opening would end talk of privitizing city trash services and enable the city at last to increase fees to reflect higher costs.

Now comes Councilman Melvin Gateley to suggest a one-eighth cent sales tax measure to allay the hit on taxpayer's pocketbooks. The council next month will consider whether to place the tax before Cape Girardeau voters, possibly as soon as August. If approved, revenue is projected to be more than $700,000 annually, or about half of all the solid waste budget. The sales tax would generate more than enough money to allay a $1.59 per month residential increase.

Not only will many residents think the sales tax a relatively painless way to get a break on their city utilities bill, but city politicians -- who have been hounded more by this issue than any other in the past few years -- likely will embrace the idea. But such politically attractive ideas can be, and usually are, bad. The solid waste sales tax is no exception.

City Attorney Warren Wells has said he's uncertain whether such a tax is legal. If it is legal, it shouldn't be. A good deal of sales tax revenue, particularly in a regional retail hub like Cape Girardeau, comes from out-of-town shoppers. To use non-residents' cash to pay for streets and sewers they in turn use is at least reasonably defensible. But how can you justify adding to the cost of an Anna, Ill. shopper's Famous Barr bill to help pay Joe Sixpack's Cape Girardeau trash bill?

I know, government does it all the time. Our income taxes fund all kinds of pork and depravity. It's wrong that income taxes are collected in Cape Girardeau to pay for scientific studies of Arkansas chicken drop, and it's also wrong to make out-of-town shoppers pay for Cape Girardeau residential trash service.

In Jackson, we enjoy "free" trash service. Of course it's no more free than trash service in Cape Girardeau. The general revenue money the city of Jackson uses to subsidize trash is money that won't go toward services the city might otherwise be able to provide. Although the billing is indirect, I pay for my trash service nevertheless. But a solid waste sales tax is akin to setting up a roadblock at the city limits of Jackson demanding toll into the city and earmarking the revenue for residential trash service.

The roadblock at least would give visitors the opportunity to turn around. But the sales tax is sneaky. Who's going to notice an eighth of a cent tax on their bill?

Aside from the immorality of the tax, there's a good chance it would lead to the very inefficiency in solid waste of which the city, I believe wrongly, already has been accused. If sales tax revenue outpaces the rate of solid waste costs, would the city annually adjust rates downward, or would costs simply rise at a corresponding rate as revenue. As long as the public pays a stable trash fee, an otherwise irate citizenry no longer will hold the city accountable for how it allocates solid waste revenue.

At a special council meeting this week, Mayor Al Spradling III summarized what the city must do. "We're going to have to bite the bullet," he said. "Any way we look at it, we're going to have to come up with the money to avoid taking the money from some other area of the budget."

This issue has been "committee-ed" to death. It's time the council quit looking for easy solutions where there are none, and impose the higher trash fees, which, after all, amount to a little more than a nickel a day.