Fed up with Vermont's tax-crazed reputation and reality, the popular ski resort area of Killington is considering seceding and becoming part of Republican-dominated New Hampshire, a growing hotbed of libertarianism.
The would-be Free Staters say the town's restaurants, inns and other businesses send $10 million a year in taxes to Montpelier and get back only $1 million in state "aid."
Killington is especially upset about a statewide property tax
imposed in 1997, under Gov. Howard Dean, to fund Vermont's costly government school monopolies. "The town of 1,092 won a Superior Court order that called the state's method of assessing local properties 'arbitrary and capricious,' but the state Supreme Court reversed that decision," the Associated Press reported today.
New Hampshire, 25 miles east, has no income tax or sales
tax. Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan said he was flattered Killington wanted to join the state.
Killington's Select Board wants to let voters consider secession on Town Meeting Day in March.
'Pleasure of the Legislature'
Vermont Secretary of State Deborah Markowitz said Killington had little chance of secession "absent an armed insurrection type of thing. ... A town is a construction of the state and exists at the pleasure of the Legislature."
"It kind of reminds us of colonial days," Town Manager David
Lewis said Thursday. "The colonies were being faced with the Stamp Act, the Tea Act, the Sugar Act. England wasn't giving them any rights. They were treating the colonies as just a revenue source."
Our suggestion: Forget about dumping tea into some harbor. How about pouring all those overpriced lattes and cappuccinos into the Connecticut River?
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