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South Florida Sun-Sentinel

September 7, 2008

0-for-3. That was the count last week for the state s Taxation and Budget Reform Commission after the state Supreme Court struck a trio of proposed constitutional amendments off the November ballot.

Floridians are right to conclude the defeat is a sorry showing for the commission. Floridians are also right to believe the commission s members, and those who appointed them, largely wasted a once-in-every-two-decades opportunity.

The commission convened last year amid high hopes. It was clear Florida s tax structure, and budget priorities, needed a major overhaul.

The commission was positioned to provide one. Its deliberative, nonpartisan structure afforded it the time and space to come up with forward-looking, creative solutions to the state s fiscal woes.

Instead, it has laid a monumental egg.

In the face of a desperate need for tax reform, the commission devoted way too much time to writing constitutional proposals dealing with funding religious efforts and private school vouchers. Talk about distractions - and useless ones at that, now that the Supreme Court has kicked those two to the curb.

Another discarded amendment actually dealt with taxation. It called for replacing the education portion of local property taxes with other state revenues.

But the Supreme Court bounced it, too, citing vague language. After a year of deliberation, was it too much to ask that the commission at least prepare a taxation-related constitutional amendment able to pass Supreme Court review? Apparently so. This version of the Taxation and Budget Reform Commission will go down as a group that did little in the face of much-needed tax reform. Floridians must learn a lesson from this failure.

In less than a decade, we will have to choose another once-every-20-year group, this time to address shortcomings in our overburdened and overextended constitution. Floridians must resolve to make the 2018 constitutional revision commission a success.

BOTTOM LINE: What a waste of time.

Source : http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/opinion/sfl-neweditamendmentsbooted,0,7022215.story

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