Property tax hike hypocrisy

Published 10:30 am Friday, December 30, 2016

This is infuriating. Our taxes don’t just go up by $35 a year. It ends up costing us hundreds of dollars a year, going up year after year, with each new tax piled on.

This City Council has never seen a property tax hike it didn’t like. Please don’t minimize the property tax by implying it’s chump change, e.g., it’s 2 cents per thousand dollars of a mortgage total. We can read our mortgage statements.

Let’s compare the “citizens’ representatives” actions and their choices between Chamber of Commerce/corporate welfare compared to the welfare of Kent citizens/homeowners.

The council just offered a big corporation a huge tax exemption to encourage them to build a big apartment complex on the par 3 golf course land. As if we needed more traffic congestion than we already have.

I hope neither of the proponents (i.e., Dana Ralph or Bill Boyce) hope to become mayor next election without a clear explanation why they exempt a big developer and hand us the tax bill to fund their budget.

– Sandra Gill