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City of Lenexa spent over $10 per “yes” vote to increase sales tax 3/8ths cent

Last month the City of Lenexa held a mail ballot election on whether to raise its retail sales tax by 3/8ths of a cent. The measure passed with 5782 “yes” ballots (58.15%) and 4161 “no” ballots (41.85%). But Lenexa spent over $10 for each of these “yes” votes to raise its sales tax!

According to the online KC Community News:

The new Lenexa tax goes into effect in October and is expected to generate about $3.5 million in the first year. The tax expires in 20 years. About 40 percent of revenues will be used on road management programs, 30 percent will fund construction of a civic center in Lenexa City Center, and 30 percent will be used for park investments.

The City of Lenexa benfits from this new tax, but why did Lenexa promote the tax? Is promoting a new tax using tax dollars a valid function of a local govennment?

Lenexa mailed out 19,500 postcards to all households in the city promoting the tax, but the postcards did not say “vote for” or “vote against” the tax. Should a government entity spend tax dollars “educating” voters about a tax increase when tax dollars are not available to challenge the need for a new tax and to promote more accountability and responsibility in government?

According to Anna M. Ancil, Lenexa City Clerk, Lenexa spent approximately $1200 on printing the postcards and about $6400 on postage to mail the 19,500 postcards to Lenexa households for this election. But this $7600 wasn’t the total cost to citizens of Lenxa.

Brian D. Newby, JoCo Election Commissioner, explained that the cost to the City of Lenexa for the election was $53,909. The JoCo Election Office held the election for Lenexa, but since only the City of Lenexa was involved, the city is responsible for paying the costs of the election instead of all JoCo taxpayers.

The election office mailed out ballots to all 31,237 registered voters in Lenexa but only 9953 were returned. (Another 4,485 ballots were returned by the post office as undeliverable.) Of those returned as ballots, 10 were invalid since 9 were blank and one person apparently voted “yes” and “no”. Of the 9943 valid ballots, 5782 (58.15%) voted “yes” and 4161 (41.85%) voted “no”. So, Lenexa will have an additional 3/8th cent sales tax for the next 20 years.

While 5782 voted “yes” there were 16,799 that chose not to vote at all, even with the ballot delivered to them in their mail box.

In Kansas we pretend that the lists of registered voters are good, but the election offices in Kansas DO NOT have valid mailing addresses for 10-15% of all voters.

In this Lenexa mail election the 4485 ballots returned by the post office represented almost 15% of the total ballots. Approximately 9.5% of Lenexa voters were known to have invalid mailing addresses (they were marked “inactive” in the voter file), but ballots were mailed to these voters at addresses known to be invalid. Why?

Federal law keeps voters on the rolls until two presidential elections are missed, but this results in a huge number of “inactive” voters with unknown mailing addresses on the list of voters. We need election reform in Kansas to ensure the integrity of our elections when there are so many names on the list of voters that should not be.

Here’s the overall cost of the election per voter:

($1200 printing + $6400 postage + $53,909 election) / 31237 voters = $1.97 per voter.

or

($1200 printing + $6400 postage + $53,909 election) / 5782 “yes” votes = $10.64 per “yes” vote.

Why do we have “special” elections, like this Lenexa tax initiative, when turnout is low by design?

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This entry was posted on Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 at 12:48 am and is filed under Kansas Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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