Exurban power grab hits home

Campbell County, Kentucky, is one locale where working-class city-dwellers can count on a lot of grief from wealthy exurbanites. Gobs of it. I know this, because I've lived here almost 36 years.

County politics in recent decades have been defined by one long power grab by affluent right-wingers in the outer suburbs. This class war has been allowed to fester and grow inward even into the cities.

Campbell County has 2 county seats: Newport and Alexandria. County services are split between the 2 courthouses, and some services are found at both, for the convenience of the public. Some 130 years ago, the county imposed a tax on the northern part of the county to build the Newport courthouse. That tax remained until just last year - although by then it was a relic, much like the Spanish-American War tax on phone bills that wasn't repealed for a century.

This was the only tax like this in recent times in Kentucky. Throughout the state, courthouses were funded equally by all state taxpayers - except in Campbell County, which imposed an additional tax on more urban and less affluent areas. The tax was abolished last year under a law sponsored by Democratic State Rep. Dennis Keene - but the Republicans fought him tooth and nail.

Why would the self-styled party of lower taxes fight to keep a tax? Simple. The Republicans are the party that gave us the war on the cities. They disdain anything that's working-class.

The exurban intelligentsia's latest urban legend is that Campbell County has only one county seat: Alexandria. It's simply not true. The Cincinnati Enquirer correctly states that Alexandria is a seat - but it ignores the fact that Newport is too.

Even the Census Bureau acknowledges that we have 2 seats:

http://www.thinkkentucky.com/edis/deskbook/files/landarea.pdf

Because the exurban elites lost their battle to force the cities to keep paying an obsolete tax, they've shifted their attention to filing a lawsuit to move all county offices out of the Newport courthouse - forcing folks in the northern part of the county to take a bus 15 miles out to Alexandria just to get a building permit or renew an ID.

The opulent outer suburbs are no longer content with sharing public and private functions with the cities. Now they want the cities to have nothing, just for its own sake.

Northern Campbell County paid a courthouse tax for 100 years longer than they needed to, and now they might lose the courthouse they paid for - all because of some cockamamie anti-city tantrum.

A new bill by Keene is designed to counter this by allowing counties to move offices outside the county seat - so there could still be a courthouse outside Alexandria. However, I don't see why this is necessary to save the Newport courthouse, as there's general agreement that Newport is also a seat.

The city is the reason suburbs and their associated wealth can exist. What's going to happen if Newport is allowed to become just a hollowed-out ghost town?

(Source: http://nky.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/AB/20090210/NEWS0103/902100357)