Think Twice before Supporting a New Tax

A version of the following commentary appeared in the Platte County Landmark.

Everyone wants to help kids thrive, right? Who could be against a new tax in Platte County to help kids get more mental health services? Well, we are. Politicizing charity and mandating it through law is a dangerous path to take. Platte County citizens would be well served to think twice before going down this road.

There is an ongoing petition drive in Platte County to create the Platte County Children’s Services Fund. If approved by voters, the plan would institute a new sales tax to fund mental health services for children in Platte County. It would create a new board in charge of overseeing the collection and distribution of the funds as grants to eligible children’s charities.

Charity should not be politized, yet that is exactly what this proposal will do in Platte County. Several years ago, the children’s service fund in St. Louis County became a flashpoint in the county executive’s race. The fund was slow to distribute money and had grown to a balance of $78 million. That large balance became a point of contention in the campaign, made worse when questionable activities with the funds led to the firing of the children’s service fund director and an FBI investigation. Even without that level of controversy, charities will still be forced to play politics. Board members of various Platte County charities that might receive funds will have to start taking that into consideration when they decide whom to support in various county political races. One can’t risk backing the wrong horse and putting the charity’s funding in jeopardy. It’s machine politics at its most insidious.

Any future Platte County Children’s Service Fund would be a special taxing district, and the last thing Platte County needs is another obscure taxing entity with little accountability and even less oversight. The children’s service fund in Lafayette County, on the eastern edge of the Kansas City region, provides a useful case study for those problems. The fund had operated for years with almost no oversight. Those operating it routinely engaged in improper activities, including funding charities that were affiliated with board members, funding charitable activities that were not eligible for funds in the first place, and funding a private business that wasn’t a nonprofit. After a whistleblower brought this to light, the state auditor investigated and referred the fund to authorities for possible Medicaid fraud. If you think the future Platte County children’s fund will be immune from these incidents, you should disabuse yourself of that notion.

If Platte County voters pass the new tax and create a children’s service fund, will some kids benefit? Of course some will. But citizens need to consider all the possible effects of this endeavor. Creating a new taxing agency with no oversight, entangling philanthropy with politics, and making charities dependent on government largesse is not a recipe for making life better in Platte County. Let’s allow these charities do what they were intended to do—help kids—without the heavy hand of government involvement.