Another tax hike up in smoke?

Ronnie Carroll doesn’t have a problem with Danville starting a new cigarette tax of  30 cents per pack. But Carroll, the owner/operator of 86 Convenience Market in Caswell County, N.C., may have made the one argument that will scare Danville City Council enough to drop the idea.

“Virginia always had the advantage with gas, alcohol and cigarette prices and lower sales tax,” Carroll said. “It may prevent some of my customers from going to Virginia if my prices are more in line.”

North Carolina has a 45-cents per pack cigarette tax, compared to Virginia’s 30 cents tax. Danville’s proposed 30-cents tax would mean that a pack of cigarettes sold within the city limits would have a total state and local sales tax bite of 60 cents — 15 cents more than North Carolina and 30 cents more than Pittsylvania County.

Part of Danville’s long-range economic plan is to be a stronger retail hub for the surrounding communities. If comments like Carroll’s don’t worry the members of Danville City Council, what will?

How about this from Jerry Wegger, the director of sales for the Pennsylvania-headquartered Sheetz: “It was a bad mistake for us to build in cities; we should have built outside of every city.”

Wegger went on to say that, “Cigarette smokers don’t stop smoking — they just go outside the city limits to buy them.”

Not all of them, of course. And not every time, either. But for a city government that has tried to become the retail hub of the Dan River Region, does it really make sense to give one group of shoppers — in this case, cigarette smokers — a reason to change their buying habits?

A similar argument has long been made about Pittsylvania County’s alcohol sales laws. In most of the county, people can’t buy beer on Sunday or a mixed drink any day of the week. Merchants and restaurant owners have long believed that put them at a competitive disadvantage. The argument against the city establishing a cigarette tax is much the same: Smokers will still smoke, but some will simply buy their cigarettes in one of the surrounding communities.

“Forty-three percent of a typical convenience store’s sales is cigarettes,” Wegger said. “This will put some of them out of business.”

The retail sales argument against the cigarette tax could be made in any community. But in the Dan River Region — home to tobacco farms and warehouses — the idea of taxing cigarettes has always been considered politically impossible — until now.

“Tobacco has always been a mainstay for Southside Virginia,” Axton tobacco farmer Darrell Jackson said. “You talk about stabbing the local farmers in the back. I don’t see how anybody in Danville city, especially who come from a farming background, can stand for that.”

They can’t, and they won’t. Danvillians don’t want any tax increases this year. Their leaders ignore that sentiment at their political peril.