County Mayor Jim Coppinger, left, and Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield.In an ideal world, Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield and Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger would meet or talk almost daily to keep a mutually cooperative agenda for the county’s increasingly bright economic future moving briskly along. The possibility that county residents may soon have to pay a fee to check out materials from the public library, the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Bicentennial Library, suggests that’s not the case, never mind the joint ownership of the land on which the city-county library sits.
Rather, talk about a library fee, a minuscule matter, can be seen as a regrettable metaphor for the frayed relationship between our city and county governments. The mayors are stumbling over stobs toward a fight when the county as a whole, infused by new and pending economic growth, should be taking flight.
At one level, the idea of charging county residents who live outside the city of Chattanooga for use of what has always been known as the city-county public library seems petty and small-minded. At another, it reflects the division between the two governments that has taken root since Littlefield’s forward-looking proposals for consolidation of some countywide services culminated in the city’s decision last month to let a 45-year-old sales tax agreement expire.
Expiration of that agreement was long overdue. It simply transferred $10.5 million of city sales tax revenue to the county’s coffers to help fund the city’s and county’s shared support of two dozen civic agencies. The problem was that the agreement had city taxpayers paying double – first from their municipal sales tax revenue, and then from the countywide property tax that all municipal residents and business in Hamilton County also pay.
County government, to be sure, kicked in a couple of million more dollars to support the services of other valuable civic non-profit agencies that had been added to the list of agencies to be funded under the conceptual umbrella of shared responsibility on which the sales-tax agreement was originally founded.