Promises made should be kept

The Mat-Su Borough Assembly has recently made a couple of very big promises.

First, the assembly has promised to overhaul its codes dealing with subdivisions of land. The issue came up recently when the assembly passed an ordinance that exempts industrially zoned land from certain segments of borough code.

Property owners working under what they describe as a very onerous and expensive set of codes, the borough’s Title 27, called foul. Why should private residents have to play by one set of rules if the borough gets to play by another?

But instead of rescinding its ordinance, the assembly chose instead to make a promise: we will overhaul Title 27.

Most notably, assemblyman Jim Colver said he was working on an ordinance that would repeal 27 and go back to the old code, Title 16, while maintaining the bits and pieces of 27 that people seem to like.

The second promise the assembly made came at the same Tuesday night meeting and had to do with road service area taxes.

In this instance, homeowners in the Lazy Mountain area were upset that they have to pay road service area taxes even though they live on state roads. Road service taxes are paid in addition to the borough’s main tax, often referred to as the Areawide Tax, which has lately hovered around 10 mills, or $10 per $1,000 of a home’s assessed value. RSA taxes are usually more like two or three mills.

Assemblywoman Cindy Bettine has said multiple times that the assembly doesn’t pay nearly enough attention to RSA taxes and allows them to creep steadily upward year after year.

We agree.

The assembly worried that if they allowed this small group of homeowners to secede from the road service area, the borough would be flooded with similar requests and would soon enough have granted so many exemptions it would be unable to maintain roads or conduct small road construction projects.

Lots of people around here live off of roads that the state maintains, apparently. And few of them would look kindly upon paying taxes they don’t owe.

So the assembly declined this request, but again offered a promise: we will fix RSA taxes. Assemblymen Warren Keogh and Ron Arvin seemed most adamant that there needed to be changes to the way the borough collects taxes for roads. Colver seemed to agree.

The promise in this case was best articulated by the mayor, who said that he would probably need to rent a gym to hold everybody and display the relevant information — the borough has a lot of road service areas, each with its own tax rate — but he said he planned to fix the system.

It is fine for politicians to make promises, but too often those promises are empty. We hope that these latest ones are backed up with some action and will be reporting on the developments as events unfold.

Stay tuned.