Walk around the eastern panhandle of West Virginia and sooner or later you will come across someone complaining about Frontier Communications. Either about the low quality of service, the archaic equipment, or the indifference of the company to the needs of its customers.
Now, Frontier is being drawn into a political fight.
As it turns out, Frontier executive Paul Espinosa is also a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates from the southern part of Jefferson County. (District 66).
Espinosa is a Republican. The Democrats couldn’t find anyone to challenge Espinosa. Enter Mountain Party candidate Daniel Lutz. Lutz is running against Espinosa.
And Lutz believes that companies like Frontier are not paying their fair share of property taxes. Last week, he walked the county with Jefferson County Assessor Angela Banks.
“The multinational corporations listed as public utility corporations in West Virginia on the state auditor’s web site do not pay any — not one nickel — of real property taxes to the counties,” Lutz said.
What real property do they have in Jefferson County?
“I’ll give you an example,” Lutz said. “Norfolk Southern and CSX have those rights-of-way for their railway tracks, which they sublease to telecommunications companies.”
Lutz said that after taking a tour of the county, showing Banks what he was talking about, Banks said she would bring up the issue at the state assessors’ conference and would investigate with the state tax department to find out why the companies are not being taxed on the property.
How much money is being lost by the counties?
Lutz estimates it’s between $3 million and $5 million a year just in Jefferson County. He estimates that Morgan County might be losing $1 million a year from the right-of-way being leased by CSX in Morgan County.
Lutz says that only two states — Louisiana and Maine — allow for the taxing of rights-of-way. Lutz said that he asked Delegate Stephen Skinner (D-Jefferson County, District 67), to introduce legislation that would give counties the authority to levy these taxes.
And earlier this year, Skinner did introduce legislation (HB 4576) that establishes “a new class of property on utility rights-of-way and easements for taxation purposes.”
“These corporations are skating by scot free as they have done for 100 years without paying any taxes,” Lutz said.
Lutz is one of those rare local politicians who is rooted in both national and local politics. He has gained the endorsement of West Virginia’s major labor unions, for example, by calling for repeal of the Taft-Hartley law, which Ralph Nader calls “one of the great blows to American democracy.”
And Lutz believes that we could transform the country with something called the Tobin tax — named after the late Nobel Prize winning economist James Tobin.
The Tobin tax is a two-tenths of one percent tax on every dollar traded on the major stock exchanges.
What would we do with that money?
“The first twenty percent would go to begin to pay down the national debt,” Lutz says. “With the second twenty percent, we would enact the equivalent of a Manhattan Project to become energy self-sufficient within five years. The third twenty percent would go to make our education world class. The fourth twenty percent would go to fund a single payer national health care system. And the last twenty percent would go to research and development and infrastructure improvement and repairs.”
“I’ve always taken something of a worldview,” Lutz said. “I can’t just look at Jefferson County or Morgan County as a separate or isolated entity. When some thug at the Royal Bank of Scotland or Credit Suisse can strike a keyboard and take the food off the plates of millions of people, I can’t afford to be parochial.”