Sean Hao had a good story yesterday about one of my biggest peeves — the Legislature’s pilfering of hundreds of million dollars from O’ahu residents paying the half-cent excise tax for rail transit.

When lawmakers authorized the city to collect the tax, they took a 10-percent share for the state off the top to pay for collection costs that aren’t nearly that much.

The result was a $40 million windfall in the first three years that could grow to some $300 million over the 20-year life of the tax, money that goes into the state general fund for legislators to spend on whatever they want — including projects in other counties that didn’t pay the tax.

The Legislature has refused repeated requests to return the windfall to the city for its intended purpose or give it back to taxpayers.

Their excuse now is that state revenues are down and they can’t afford to give up the money, but the state had a $700 million surplus when legislators first voted to pointlessly run up the cost of Hawai’i’s most expensive public works project ever by 10 percent from the outset.

The state’s greedy rake isn’t the chump change some have depicted; $300 million could go a long way toward paying for one of the rail lines to the airport, Waikiki or the University of Hawai’i that were cut to reduce the cost of the $3.7 transit project from Kapolei to Honolulu.

In non-rail terms, $300 million would mostly cover the massive cost of upgrading O’ahu’s dilapidated sewage collection system or pay one-third the cost of Sand Island and Honouliuli sewage treatment upgrades being demanded by the EPA that Mayor Mufi Hannemann claims would bankrupt the city.

At least Hao got an e-mail advocating returning the surplus to the city out of Hannemann, who has been mostly silent on the matter. He needed the support of legislators to enact the transit tax and no doubt will need their good will again before this this project is done.

Also quiet is Gov. Linda Lingle, who opposed having the state collect the city’s transit tax, but now is benefiting from having the extra money for the state to budget as much as the Legislature.

There’s little chance these funds will ever be returned unless Hannemann and Lingle make a bigger issue of it by standing up to fight for cheated O’ahu taxpayers and demanding that lawmakers publicly explain their shameless vigorish.

Tags: Legislature, Linda Lingle, mass transit, Mufi Hannemann, taxes

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 3:00 am and is filed under Volcanic Ash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.