Escondido's misguided tax hike

By: North County Times - Editorial | Wednesday, January 19, 2005 10:16 PM PST ∞

Our View: Imposing taxes is serious business, and government intrusion must be reserved for last resorts and rigorously protected from the temptations of expediency or caprice. We invoke these truths on the occasion of Escondido's push to levy a tax on burglar alarms and to build files of personal information about the people and companies who use them.

In a Jan. 7 letter, city officials told residents that they must register their burglar alarms, pay a $25 to $55 annual fee (a taxing technique that avoids the requirement for voter approval) and answer a series of questions about gun ownership, pet ownership and possession of hazardous materials. The letter was the result of a measure enacted in May ---- a naked attempt to raise revenue by a city council that twice voted big pay hikes for city workers in recent years.

The official explanation is that scrambling police to check out false alarms costs city taxpayers $250,000 a year. The new tax on alarm owners is expected to raise $300,000 a year. As for the registration information, police say they need to know whether they may encounter a vicious dog, a loaded gun or a pile of dangerous chemicals.

Of course, such reasoning means that Escondido must immediately compile dossiers on every household and business in the city. After all, we desperately hope that tripped burglar alarms are not the sole reason police visit homes and businesses in the city.

Certainly, such gathering of information need not trigger paranoid fantasies of local government plots. At the same time, we point out that large-scale intrusion by law enforcement into the lives of innocent people runs hard against basic liberty. List-making must be confined to absolute necessity and extreme threats to public safety.

False alarms are certainly a nuisance. When they divert police from real crime fighting, they are dangerous. Yet we suspect that on balance, burglar alarms aid the cause of crime prevention and catching criminals. What's more, a tax on all owners of such systems punishes folks who install them correctly and maintain them with care. The council doubled fines for serial false alarmers; we submit that even higher fines are far better than a flat tax.

The episode is a potent reminder that absent citizen involvement and careful scrutiny, governments drift naturally to more taxes and less liberty.