Creative Loafing Online
May 7, 2002
– A swipe at Fulton tax commissioner was misguided and misdirected.
Defending his misguided legislation to limit the powers of Fulton County’s tax commissioner, Rep. Douglas Dean told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “I want a tax commissioner who is sensitive to people’s financial condition and who will work with people. We have to be concerned about more than collection taxes.”
With all due respect, Rep. Dean, no, we don’t. A tax collector’s job is not to be a warm-and-fuzzy, sensitive New Age Guy. His job is to collect as much money as he can, as efficiently as possible. If people aren’t paying what they owe, he needs to come down on them, hard, because letting them slide is monstrously unfair to those who are paying their taxes.
And by any measure, Tax Commissioner Arthur Ferdinand does his job extremely well. Inheriting a mess when he was appointed in 1997 – with an astonishing backlog of $200 million of delinquent property taxes – Ferdinand has gone after scofflaws with a vengeance. He’s tried to shame them by publicly releasing their names, He’s tried to get their attention by selling tax liens on their property to private collection firms.
