Click photo to enlarge
Harold Griffith of Watsonville, a 62-year-old former printer and carpentry... (Dan Coyro/Sentinel)
FREEDOM - Every once in a while, a watchdog gets his bone.
Harold Griffith, a 62-year-old Freedom man with an anti-government mien and a keen eye for statutes, recently fired off a raft of letters complaining that the county's 10 percent lodging tax was illegal when enacted nearly 20 years ago.
Tuesday, the county may side with Griffith, weighing an urgent ordinance to roll back its tax to 9.5 percent, a move that would cost the county approximately $200,000 annually, based on present tax figures.
You would think that would make Griffith happy. It does not. Rather, he wants the tax repealed altogether.
"It does not say that they raised the tax from 9.5 to 10 percent. It says they imposed a tax of 10 percent," Griffith said, referring to a 1992 law that bumped up the county's transient occupancy tax. "If you and I shaved the law like that, we'd have been in prison a long time ago."
Griffith argues that the tax is illegal under a quarter-century-old law saying any general tax increases must be approved by a vote of the people. In 1992, the county board raised the 9.5 percent tax to 10 percent without a countywide vote.
"Now that this matter has been brought to the attention of the county, it would be appropriate to amend the county's TOT ordinance to reduce the rate to nine and one-half percent," County Counsel Dana McRae wrote in a memo to the board.

to read the rest of the article, please visit the Sentinel article.