by David Safier
Where is Rob O'Dell when you need him? If this story about the Republicans in the state legislature raising individuals' property taxes to cut $70 million from the state budget were about Tucson's City Council, we'd have a screaming headline and blame, blame, blame pointed at every Council member.
We might also have learned early in the story that people whose homes are worth half a million or more get a huge break on the tax hike, making this a regressive property tax.
But since O'Dell and the Star are only attack dogs when it comes to the Democrat-majority City Council (and, of course, TUSD), we hear the story told differently. The Star goes as light as it can on Republican legislators.
As always with the Star, we begin with the headline:
If I didn't know better, I'd think TUSD was the guilty party here, raising our taxes. That's par for the course for the Star, which can never decide who to trash more, TUSD or the City Council.
Here are the heads on the same story in the Trib and the Sun. Note that neither mentions a school district by name.
It's a Howard Fischer story with local information added by the Star's Alexis Huicochea, so most of it appears in all three papers. Here is the way the first paragraph reads in the Trib and the Sun. Watch for the quotes around the last word, "fairness."
Homeowners in a handful of school districts are in for a nasty surprise because of some changes state lawmakers made in education finance laws in the name of “fairness.”
The Star removed the quotes. Just took them out. So, while the word "fairness" is made suspect by the quotes in the original, the Star's version says, Really, this property tax hike is fair. Here's the paragraph from the Star.
Homeowners in a handful of school districts are in for an unpleasant surprise because of some changes that state lawmakers made in education-finance laws in the name of fairness.
Word for word, except the quotes are removed. Purposely. It's not an inadvertent typo. The story was cut-and-pasted, then edited. Removing the quotes to alter the meaning of the paragraph was an editorial decision.
There's more to say about the ways the Star butchered the story in the interest of softening the blame on Republicans for purposely and consciously raising property taxes while adhering to their No New Taxes pledge at the state level. You can read more below the fold.
I have the Star and Trib version up on my computer, side by side. The Star includes lots of local detail, especially about TUSD, but I'm more interested in what it cuts from the original Fischer article.
The first significant cut comes in the explanation of how the state legislature changed things to raise the property tax. The Star combined two sentences, leaving out the fact that the Republicans had to get rid of a standing cap on property taxes to raise them. Here's the version as it reads in the original, before the Star softened it.
State lawmakers, facing a 1980 initiative to cap rising property taxes, crafted their own changes. One of those requires the state to pick up a percentage of the primary property taxes homeowners pay for public schools.
In other words, the state raised your taxes [at the local level] so it wouldn't have to raise your taxes [at the state level]. They kicked the tax hike down the stairs.
The story continues, bringing up TUSD issues in the Star (fair enough) and quoting two Republican legislators in support of the property tax hike.
Then it's time for Democrat Chad Campbell to speak his mind. The first thing Campbell says is that the Democrats didn't learn about the change until the last minute, which sounds pretty underhanded on the Republican's part. That fact is left out of the Star article, which cut this passage:
Rep. Chad Campbell, D-Phoenix, said Democrats, who were not part of the budget-crafting process in the Republican-controlled Legislature, said they only learned of the change right as the measure was being adopted.
The Star cuts right to the next paragraph, where Campbell "conceded there is a fairness argument" in the tax hikes. So it sounds like he basically agrees with what the Republicans did. Of course, he doesn't.
And here's an extended Campbell quote about revamping the unfair tax system and instituting a "comprehensive tax reform package" that doesn't make it into the Star story — not surprising, since this is one of the Democrat's strongest budgetary issues:
"Instead of doing a cut here or an increase here or shifting the burden from one school district, or from the state to a school district or whatever it may be, we need to sit down and reform our entire tax code because it's broken and it's not working,'' he said.
Campbell and some other Democrats have instead been pushing for what they call "a comprehensive tax reform package.'' That specifically includes subjecting more transactions to the state sales tax, many of these in the form of services that are now exempt.
"You can actually lower the burden for the average family in the state and close those loopholes and actually make it easier for people to make ends meet,'' Campbell said.
If nothing else, he said the timing of the change is lousy.
"I think springing this type of tax increase on certain homeowners without any type of forewarning in this type of economy is probably not the wisest thing to be doing either,'' Campbell said.
Actually, the Star left the last two sentences of that passage in. Well, kind of. Where the original has Campbell calling the timing of the change "lousy," the Star softened that to "bad." Can't have something the Republicans do called lousy by a Democrat, can we now?
I would be surprised and outraged by the Star's blatant reworking of a story to shift attention away from the Republicans' culpability in raising our taxes locally so they wouldn't have to pass a tax increase. But I've seen this kind of thing on such a regular basis, I've lost my ability to be surprised.