The Madison County Commission has removed the proposed county wide sales tax from Friday’s agenda.

The Madison County Commission won’t vote as planned Friday on a proposal to levy a half-cent sales tax for schools.

Commissioner Roger Jones said this afternoon he pulled the item from Friday’s commission agenda because commissioners need more time to study data provided by the county’s three school systems.

The move is in response to commitments from a majority of commissioners to vote against the measure.

This is the right decision.  Madison County needs to find a way to get additional revenue to the county schools without burdening Huntsville and Madison City.  Of course they may want to get a firm capital plan and spending guarantees from the school board first.

The cries from the schools for more capital funds won’t go away anytime soon, but at least a better way than a countywide sales tax can be addressed now.

Update: Here is a more thorough article from the Huntsville Times.  Dale Strong basically called Roger Jones a liar for delaying the vote.  Jones claimed he needed more demographic data from the school board, but Strong claims to be the only one to request such data - and he has received it.  Strong alleges (and I suspected this as well) that Jones is stalling until one of the commissioners flips to his side.

• Sales tax extortion in Madison County
• Madison schools want tax money without strings
• If you buy it, they will tax us
• Madison County Sales Tax Vote Tomorrow
• No sales tax increase in Madison County - for now

This entry was posted by Brian on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Madison County, Taxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.