Election 2011: If Elected, Will Trustee Candidates Vote to Repeal Last Year's Sales Tax Increase?

Would you vote in favor of a repeal of last year’s sales tax increase? If so, what more would you cut from the village budget to replace that lost revenue? If not, what can you say to taxpayers that increased taxes through the village aren’t in the future?

None of us like to pay taxes.

If the sales tax were no longer needed, I would support repealing. We can discuss taxation theories forever and accomplish little. I will pose a question. Why are the happiest people in the world paying 40 to 50 percent of their income on taxes? And they are safer. We spend too much time on taxes and not enough time on waste, fraud and greed.

Eliminate those and participate more in shaping our government (voting) and our taxes probably would go down.

Yes I would vote to repeal last year’s sales tax increase.

I voted against the sales tax increase in the first place because I felt we were not finished reducing our spending in the village. I  do understand the village needed to implement the sales tax increase by a specific date in order to maximize the revenue they would have gained.

My question to the board members who votes yes was, how can you ask residents for an increase in their taxes when we haven’t finished reducing spending. It was not right to do that to voters.

I don’t believe the village needs to cut any village services in order to balance the budget. Soon the village will be ending some the village’s tax incentives and giveaways that previous boards unwisely granted developers. We should redirect these funds to future projects the village needs.

A few weeks ago, others on the board voted in favor of giving almost $100,000 away to another developer. This practice needs to stop. This is the equivalent of one, maybe two village employee’s job and benefits. I would like to know from other board members how they plan to pay for that salary or salaries.

I am a pro business candidate.  

As I have been talking to members of our business community one of the things they tell me is how the sales tax increase has added another barrier and made competing with neighboring towns that much more challenging.  

In an effort to make our community more business friendly I am absolutely in favor of looking at ways to rollback the sales tax.  A modest decrease may be all that is possible given our current budget woes and the state of the economy but it is worth pursuing.  

In addition, a pro business and pro taxpayer initiative I propose is to require a super majority for any future home rule sales tax or fee increases.  This protection will require 5 votes rather than 4 votes in order to pass any new fees or taxes onto business or taxpayers.  We must do everything to increase Oswego’s competitive advantage, these proposals will do so.

I did not vote in favor of the local sales tax. Whether or not the local sales tax is repealed I do not support increased taxes for our village. We must live within our means. Times are tough for many and we cannot have government making them tougher.

The State has greatly fallen behind in shared revenue payments which means our General Fund Reserves have to be higher than we thought which makes a complete repeal now fiscally irresponsible.

The single largest expenditure of our operating budget is staff salaries and benefits. To enable us reducing taxes in the future we must not increase the number of staff until times necessitate such a need. With low growth, we must become more efficient and handle the small amount of growth with the current staffing levels.

Utilizing our existing expertise and no staff growth is the best way to avoid increasing our cost structure. All of us are being asked to do more with the same or less. Given the current economic circumstances, a more realistic goal is to remove half of the local sales tax increase when the State has resumed normal timely payments and we have a growing stable economy.

Editor's note: Trustee candidates , ,  and  did not return answers to candidate followup questions.