A provision in the new state budget enabling two county municipalities to effectively reverse any Porter County withdrawal from the Northwest Indiana Regional Development Authority is drawing cries of taxation without representation, which in turn are being labeled a red herring.
According to the new budget adopted Tuesday, if the county withdraws from the RDA, the fiscal bodies of two or more municipalities could vote to join it and the $3.5 million in county tax revenues to the RDA would continue.
In April, the County Council voted 4-3 to withdraw its representative to the RDA, with the majority citing popular opposition to the tax and perceived lack of benefit to the county from its membership.
"To allow two municipalities to put us into the RDA is taxation without representation," Porter County Commissioner Bob Harper said Wednesday. "You shouldn't have that decision put on you by officials you don't vote for."
Harper said he was sure courts would overturn the decision.
Officials who don't represent everyone in the county would be allowed to impose a tax on everyone, County Council member Laura Blaney said.
State Rep. Ed Soliday, R-Valparaiso, said charges of taxation without representation were inaccurate and used by RDA opponents as a smoke screen.
"It's a nice phrase, but you can't apply it down to every tax dollar," he said.
The provision would pass constitutional muster, Soliday said, because lawyers for the legislature vetted the budget language with precisely that in mind.
No member of the council opposing the RDA was elected by 50 percent of voters, yet the council was trying to tell the majority and municipalities they could choose to be in the RDA, Soliday said.
"Why should four people out of seven (on the county council) say to cities you can't belong to a regional transit entity?" he said.
The budget provision, Soliday said, grew out of a call by municipal leaders in the county for continued membership in the RDA.
But County Council member Dan Whitten made no bones about his distaste for the provision.
"I find it disgusting, unconscionable and unconstitutional," he said.
Whitten said he would seek to have the council's lawyers challenge the provision's constitutionality.
