Citizens within the City of Guthrie boundaries will be heading to the polls. Earlier this week a town hall meeting was held for the one percent proposed sales tax increase. Now, that meeting can be viewed online.
An estimated 60 people were in attendance, mostly made up of city employee’s, firefighters and police officers, to hear the details on the upcoming election set for Aug. 26 inside the Oklahoma Territorial Sports Museum.
City resident James Long served as the moderator with a panel of Fire Chief Eric Harlow, Councilman Gaylord Z. Thomas, Rate and Fee Committee member Bob Davis and City Manager Sereniah Breland.
As the price of goods rise due to inflation, so does the generation of taxes on the higher priced goods, so there is no need to increase the tax rate unless funds are being mismanaged or people stop shopping in Guthrie due to other factors. Among those other factors would be price competition which means shopping out of town, which will be even more attractive with a tax hike. There’s no reason city sales taxes should increase 33.33% (from 3 to 4 percent), that is WAY beyond anything close to being reasonable. While there may be over 180 cities in Oklahoma at or above 4%, the other 560+ are below 4%, and the average rate for all cities in the state is 2.77%. The real battle is not inflation, but the rising cost of providing services caused by annexation of rural areas. If the city needs to reduce costs, consider downsizing the staff that made the decision that it would be cost effective to annex more land and provide services to that new area and/or consider deannexation of rural areas.