Dabakis Speaks out on Sales-Tax Increase If Prison Comes to Town
If the state puts a prison in the city, there would be a sales-tax increase that would raise tens of millions of dollars to make up for the daily influx of commuters and tourists who stress Salt Lake City’s resources.
In the final hours of its 45-day session, the Legislature added the sales-tax sweetener to a bill giving the Prison Relocation Commission until Aug. 1 to pick a site. None of the five areas on the short list wants the prison.
But Salt Lake City is the only one that would likely consider such a tax hike, which could not be larger than 0.5 percent and would not apply to big-ticket items like cars, planes or mobile homes. The other possible locations — unincorporated Tooele County, Grantsville, Eagle Mountain and Fairfield — have small populations, few visitors and few sales to tax.
Jim Dabakis (D-District 2) spoke exclusively to Gephardt Daily: “There was a bill about the prison and who was going to make the final decision, was it going to be the legislature, could the Governor veto it?” he said. “There was a lot of technical things in the prison bill. And as I looked through the bill, I couldn’t help but notice that Salt Lake City had put in there that if the prison goes to Salt Lake they can raise the sales tax by half a percent, and I thought how can this be possible? The people of Salt Lake don’t want the prison in the first place, and we get this giant bonus of getting a tax increase if we accept the prison. Why would that happen? Who made the decision? Where did it come from? Why was it slipped in at the last minute? And I think Salt Lake City needs to answer that question because the bill passed, I voted against it, but to bring the prison to the west side of Salt Lake, and to increase taxes, to the city that is accepting this prison, seems to me to be a double whammy and something that Salt Lake City needs to answer for. The legislative session is over and we live with the results of the legislature.”
Dabakis wrote on his Facebook page yesterday: “Could it be that the city made a backroom deal? Was the City, its lobbyist or the bureaucracy trying to slip this under the radar? Was this a tit-for-tat, state to SLC—‘you take the prison, we will let you raise your sales tax’? If it was, it is despicable!”
Mayor Ralph Becker said in a statement: “I continue to be strenuously opposed to the state relocating the prison to Salt Lake City. My administration and our City Council have been working hard to persuade the Legislature and Governor to remove both proposed Salt Lake City locations from consideration. These two sites remain wholly inappropriate locations for the new prison, as my staff detailed in a 45-page report we drafted and distributed to the public back in December.
“If it were up to us, the prison would remain in its current Draper location. Last year, I issued an online petition opposing the prison and collecting thousands of signatures from Salt Lake City residents. I have also held multiple community forums and press conferences to call attention to our opposition to locating the prison in Salt Lake City and to ask for help from the community in lobbying state leaders.
“As to the issue of the impacted communities sales tax, it is absolutely true that for many years my administration has advocated for the Legislature to create such an option as a means of helping reduce the unfair burden shouldered by Salt Lake City taxpayers and create a way for visitors and the sizable commuter population to our Capital City to contribute to the cost of city funded services like police, fire and snow removal which benefits all but is currently only paid for by Salt Lake City residents.
“Bottom line, my position has and continues to be NO to locating a prison in Salt Lake City and YES to visitors offsetting the expense of providing government services to everyone who lives, works and plays in our great city.”
