A TRICK TO RAISE REVENUE?

In some ways, it might be a good thing that our legislature just
passed an increase in auto registration fees to repair the state's
bridges. Given recent economic news -- foreclosures, myriad mortgages
that exceed the house's market price, rising unemployment --
Coloradans may well need solid, safe bridges to sleep under.

Even so, the FASTER measure, as it was called, was a bad piece of
public policy. The governor and the General Assembly lacked the
courage to raise this revenue in an honest way, by pursuing an
increase in the gasoline tax, so they slithered through this with a
"fee increase."

This got me to wondering what other fees the state government might
impose or elevate, so as to raise revenue without the bother of asking
voters to approve something straightforward like a tax increase.

For instance, my Qwest bill not only includes local and state sales
taxes, but a "local 911 fee" of $1. I did some checking a few years
ago. In our rural backwater, 911 service arrived well after it was a
fixture in more civilized zones. After it got here, the number of
emergency calls more than doubled in the first year, which meant more
demands on local law enforcement, fire departments, EMTs and
ambulances, etc.

In other words, 911 means increased calls for government services, and
that could give the legislature ample justification for raising the
fee to $5 or $10 a month per phone line.

But there may be another way our state government will try to raise
revenue without increasing taxes. Ever hear of something called "Civil
Asset Forfeiture"?

To understand it, start with criminal asset forfeiture. Your neighbor
is cooking meth in his house. He gets busted and convicted. His
beakers and flasks get confiscated. That's fair enough.

But the government could also attempt to take the house in civil court
- -- and in some states, could do so even if your neighbor was
acquitted. That's "civil asset forfeiture."

In other words, if you were merely suspected of a crime, or the local
sheriff didn't like something you said at a public meeting and
suspected you had replaced a P-trap under your kitchen sink without
getting a building permit, the police could seize your property.

Obviously, this procedure is ripe for abuse, and in 2002 Colorado
adopted a law to prevent such abuses. It requires a criminal
conviction before forfeiture, and protects innocent property owners
whose tenants commit crimes. It requires forfeiture proceeds to go
through the regular budget process, rather than to the policing
agency. It has reporting requirements.

In other words, our current law allows asset forfeiture as a
legitimate tool of law enforcement, but makes the process fair and
open.

But apparently, it doesn't bring in enough money, and thus House Bill
1238, sponsored by Joe Rice, a Littleton Democrat, would repeal the
requirement for a conviction as well as the reporting requirement. In
other words, it allows cops to seize property on mere suspicion and
auction it off, with a big chunk of the profits going to the "seizing
agency."

Hey, why pay taxes to support police departments when they can finance
themselves this way? And why bother with the burdens of convicting
someone in criminal court when you can just grab his assets through a
civil procedure, where there's no right to counsel and no protection
against self-incrimination?

Applied vigorously, HB 1238 could enhance revenues without raising
taxes, and I can't think of any other reason that this legislature
would even consider such an assault on a quaint, old-fashioned concept
like "No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property,
without due process of law."