Tax rate next fight

Demonstrating the kind of obdurate density most commonly found in that foreign land known as Washington, Augusta County supervisors – five of them at least, the Gang of Six having been diminished by one – acted Wednesday in accordance with an inevitability they long ago had determined. Unless Churchville lawyer and sheep farmer Francis Chester, that stirrer of pots and masses, produces magic instead of wool, there will be no reassessment rollback.

Hearing but not heeding taxpayers who appeared by the hundreds at the Government Center in Verona and by the thousands in petitions brandished by Chester, supervisors rejected 5-2 a motion to set aside the reassessment. Tracy Pyles proposed the rollback and Jeremy Shiflett emerged to back him.

Opponents of the reassessment, which increases property values by more than a fourth, had labeled the showdown as a tax revolt tea party, and without dumping crates into the drink, did their able best to replicate the rebellion. Traveling on tractors and in trucks and cars and spilling from one room into another at the government center, taxpayers shouted and shook fists, all to no avail. Never mind questions over the reassessment’s accuracy and methodology, the process, supervisors tell us, is the thing, and it is finished.

Now the fight, what remains of it, is left to Chester, who has pledged to sue the county. In this space, we have opined enough on the subject. Our voice chimed with those of Chester, Pyles and taxpayers in favor of a rollback. The matter now has been decided, with only the courts left to say otherwise.

But supervisors should take care to recognize that all is not resolved. There remains the issue of the tax rate. It has been presumed that supervisors will adjust the rate to keep revenues even with last year, a move Pyles supported earlier and will surely back with his vote later and Shiflett, after initial reticence, also has said he favors. Changing the tax rate will not eliminate disparities, nor will it safeguard all homeowners against a fatter bill. But it is a step that now must be regarded as a necessity.

Talk of revolt over taxes is rippling across the country these days. Those who take such chest-thumping literally likely are the same people whose basements were stocked with canned goods and kerosene nine years ago, when a computer glitch was supposed to bring technological Armageddon. But the spirit of discontent evinced Wednesday and simmering elsewhere should not be ignored.

An Augusta man called for a tax strike. Whether he’ll find backers is not the point. People here and elsewhere are staggering under the tax burden, and tiring of it. Americans will tolerate much, so long as all reason is not lost among those who govern. There is a growing sense among some people that government is treading close to that boundary.

County supervisors have failed once in delivering what they ought. Rather than roll back values, they have cowered like frightened schoolchildren behind the skirts of state code. At least it might be said that few people paying close attention anticipated anything different. But the expectations regarding the tax rate are equally clear.

Supervisors ought to step forward now and pledge their commitment to the lower rate. This would not quell the anger but reduce it. Failing in this, supervisors can be assured that tempers will remain at full boil and that the outcry over reassessments will be supplanted by a new, bitterer furor.