Perhaps not such a good idea after all

Staunton River Supervisor Marshall Ecker recently suggested that Pittsylvania County offer tax incentives to companies that generate green energy.

But Ecker almost immediately withdrew the idea because it didn’t receive a positive response, vowing to bring it back at a later date.

“First thing you know, we’ll start losing a lot of taxes,” Dan River Supervisor James Snead said in opposition to the idea, in part because corporations would likely start asking for the tax break. “This would hurt us, especially with our budget crunch going into the new year.”

That’s true, of course.

A tax break for anything means the tax burden gets shifted to the remaining tax payers. How much of a burden would be spread around? That all depends on how the tax break was structured.

Pittsylvania County is home to Dominion’s Pittsylvania Power Station in Hurt, an electric power generating plant that burns both wood chips and biomass. Piedmont BioProducts in Gretna is one of the region’s leading green businesses. And VanDerHyde Dairy has been working to get enough money to build a new system to convert the methane gas from its dairy cows’ manure into electricity.

How many of those types of projects does Ecker really want to promote through the use of a tax incentive? The answer will have to wait until better times — and more direction from the county’s political leaders.

We’ve already seen the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors struggle to increase taxes that the voters asked them to raise to pay for renovations at the county’s four high schools.

Just this year, the Board of Supervisors declined to make any changes to the county’s land use program, a valuable tax break that helps farmers, ranchers and foresters keep their property.

County Administrator Dan Sleeper estimated that 100 of the 4,354 parcels under land use no longer qualified for the program. But property owners haven’t had to re-register their land since the early 1990s, which means Pittsylvania County could be giving tax breaks to some property owners that don’t deserve them.

So, given the trouble the county already has in raising taxes the people want raised and making sure that tax breaks are given only to those who earned them, maybe the best thing for Ecker to do would be to find other ways to help the county’s promising green energy generation sector.