After presentation last week of
the document, a few legislators seemed more upset than anything else over the
Office of Motor Vehicles plan to expand service offerings through private
entities for an increased fee. Currently, about 120 private operators perform
some services dealing with titles, registrations, and insurance reinstatements,
but now two also can perform license and identification issuances and renewals,
for which the Department of Public Safety allows them to charge an additional
fee. DPS wishes to expand this program statewide.
No hue and cry emerged from the
Legislature in 2001 when the original set of services was let to private
providers with their additional fees. But this one seems to have struck a nerve
among the more excitable, if less cogent, legislators. Indeed, state Rep. Kenny Havard – no
stranger he to making stupid statements in trying to prevent making government
smaller – wailed that the Legislature ought to have final authority over every
change of tax or fee but implied it was obligated in this case because the
higher charge amounted to a tax. The Constitution states that the
Legislature must approve of all tax increases by a two-thirds vote.
How it might do this any time
soon is a mystery, because the 2014 regular session is designated as “general”
and only in odd-numbered
years may the Legislature consider tax increases in regular session. But an
even greater mystery is to find any logic at all behind Havard’s thinking,
although the intellectual laziness into which he falls happens all
too often on this subject when
politics triumphs over principle. Simply, when a charge is reasonably related
to the function it is funding and its cost, and it is initiated voluntarily as
part of a transaction by a user without government compulsion in order to
receive that reasonably-related service, it is a fee, not a tax.
As explained by DPS, the extra
fee is for convenience with this already established by precedence for
registrations, titles, and reinstatements. Further, every parish will continue
to have at least one location where the extra fee will not be charged. While
the two government locations in East Baton Rouge Parish were halved in number
by privatizing one of these, the other location will continue to operate. And
in the other pilot location, Jefferson Parish, one additional privatized location
was created. To use simple, concrete terms that perhaps even Havard can
understand, in every parish of the state nobody is having a gun put to their
head and forced to pay an extra $18 for a license or identification issuance or
renewal; they have a choice. It’s not a tax.
Of actual validity is the idea
that the Legislature should review the action, especially, as state Rep. Karen St. Germain
noted, since it was initiated through the emergency rule-making process
taking effect Jan. 13. That statute invites legislative inquiry after a certain
period and allows it to invalidate that rule by its discretion – although by
the time it could take up the matter the Legislature would be in session and
the emergency rule already more than halfway through its allowed 120-day life.
But as St. Germain expressed
puzzlement over why the rule bypassed the normal process, to dispel that she
should introduce herself to the Louisiana Register, where by law the reason for
this must be stated. Once she knows what that is, she can turn to the January, 2014 version
(they always come out on the 20th of a month and contain all rules
issued from the 11th of the previous month up to the 10th
of that month) and read why: DPS has permanent rules due out no earlier than
Feb. 20 and vendors had already invested the time and resources to start now.
Whether she thinks this imperils “the public safety and welfare” required by
law for justification in another matter, but there’s the reason.
In any event, the fee, the
payment of which is left purely to the discretion of users who may wish a
shorter turnaround time, as long as service provision for non-payers remains
adequate, seems quite reasonable as a means to increase system capacity at no additional
taxpayer cost. Unless, of course, you are a legislator wishing to bring
attention to yourself primarily and to deal honesty with the issue secondarily,
which then triggers fake outrage over fake tax increases in an attempt to score
political points.
Regrettably, such posturing for
political consumption is more the norm than the exception for the Louisiana
Legislature, which in 2010
repealed general fee increases for OMV not because they didn’t reasonably
relate to the actual cost of performing the services, but because it allowed
them to posture as protecting the pocketbooks of citizens and to hand what they
saw as a legislative defeat to their ideological opponent Jindal. Even if he
hardly can be expected to meddle in such minute affairs, he has OMV in DPS
under his ultimate authority, so in these zealots’ eyes when they reverse
executive branch policy of any kind they become Andrew Jackson at the Battle of
New Orleans, when in reality they much more resemble kids tossing Baby Ruth bars into a
pool.
To score political points
explains why so much is getting made of so little. If the Legislature does
decide to review the rule, let’s hope, perhaps against hope, that it actually
ends up conducting this seriously and maturely, rather than with the demagoguery
it’s more prone to pursue on this kind of issue.
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