The Douglas County commissioners surprised everyone in the chambers, judging by the silence.
Government will do that every once in awhile. That's part of what keeps the political junkies interested and constituents hopeful.
Convened to pass what seemed inevitable, the commissioners in a couple of bureaucratic minutes last Thursday evening backed off a new business tax that had been under consideration for months.
A crowd primed for the face-off, survey and talking points in hand, suddenly sat back, jaws agape, a bit dazed. What, no battle tonight?
The board had just voted unanimously to deny the latest bid to impose a business license and associated fees designed mainly to raise revenue for a county government beginning to feel what the business community has felt for over a year now.
Imagine that, an elected body that turns down a chance to raise taxes. Quick, send 'em to Washington, or even Carson City.
It's an almost immutable law, like gravity, that staff co-opts the elected officials. This is not from some venality, only outlook. A government's non-elected leaders always view taxes as revenue that can be put to more good than if you and I spent those pennies on the dollar we earn how we saw fit.
They see the good they could do if only they had more pennies. They know how hard their employees work, how much they can't quite get to, and on the human level develop loyalty to their people.
As do we all.
That's why the politicians we elect need to be strong indeed as they work with the staff, becoming ever more understanding about their "needs," while keeping a padlock on the community's coffers.
There are times to raise taxes, impose new fees and all that - if the "free" market truly cannot deal with a challenge, and the community agrees at the ballot box. Otherwise, the government ought to rise and fall with the economy that supports it.
Right now, the economy has dipped. The local governments need to tighten their belts with the rest of us.
So kudos to the commissioners for holding the line on the business fee. They should do the same with the other opportunities to slip in little extra fees and other costs on their constituents. Let's apply all that creativity to the expense side of the equation, as Commissioner David Brady suggested when interviewed about the business license last week.
"We haven't completely evaluated our expenditures," he told reporter Susie Vasquez. "We have to reduce those before we raise taxes."
They might have been a little hard on the staff by dismissing the value of a business license for keeping better records on businesses in the community and calling the fee structure complicated and expensive.
To the contrary, it couldn't be much simpler and the actual expensive by itself wouldn't be much. An employer of four or fewer people wouldn't pay anything, for example, beyond the initial $25 fee. At the other end, $1,600 annually for a company employing over a thousand is likewise pocket change.
The staff did quite a good job of thinking this through. Fault the commissioners themselves, if you must, for entertaining the idea in the first place and then continuing to consider it as the local economy faltered these past months.
The commissioners could have - should have - just said no a long time ago when some bright bulb on the staff suggested this. But then, their meetings wouldn't be nearly so fun sometimes if they were infallible.
Ultimately, they made the right call on the business license, and unanimously too. Who could have guessed that outcome?
n Don Rogers, publisher of The Record-Courier, can be reached at 782-5121, ext. 208, or drogers@recordcourier.com.
