By Helen Colwell Adams
Sunday News (Lancaster, Pennsylvania)
Copyright 2006 Lancaster Newspapers, Inc.
Lancaster, Pa. — One piece of legislation that won’t be working its way through the lame-duck session this week is yet a third try to fix problems in the law establishing the Emergency and Municipal Services tax.
Gov. Ed Rendell vetoed a bill sponsored by Sen. Gib E. Armstrong, R-13th District, that would prevent municipalities from levying the $52 tax on anyone earning less than $12,000 a year and force them to collect the tax per pay period rather than in a lump sum.
Rendell said in his Nov. 9 veto of Senate Bill 157 that the timeline in the bill, forcing municipalities to switch to incremental collection and enact an income limit by the end of the year, wasn’t realistic.
The governor said he is “deeply concerned that due to the short window permitted for the passage of these local ordinances, municipalities across the state will lose revenues already planned for in their annual budgets, which have already been adopted.”
He said he supports the installment payment concept and the income cap and urged the Legislature to send him another bill next year.
The tax, which replaced the occupational privilege tax, is intended to help municipalities pay for services such as fire protection, police and roads because it applies to all workers in a community, including those who live elsewhere.
Armstrong, who authored the EMS tax legislation in 2005 and has been trying since then to tweak the law, said the problem was “mainly the timing.”
“They have a legitimate gripe about it,” he said of municipalities that criticized the 2007 deadline. “They want it to go into effect in 2008 instead of 2007 because they already have their budgets set up.”
Armstrong said he is working on language for a new bill that will be introduced in January. He has spoken with the Pennsylvania League of Cities and Municipalities, one of the organizations that complained to Rendell, to get its support.
“We knew [the timing] would be a problem” with SB157, Armstrong said, although the city of Lancaster, which already had a $12,000 income cap, wasn’t one of those upset by the legislation.
“I knew it was a bone of contention early on, and thought, ‘Well, we’ll try it,’ ” he said. “It would impact negatively some municipalities. ... You never get a bill that will please everybody, and we knew that.”