Q&A: My Sukkah Covering. Do I Need to Pay Twice?
My Sukkah Covering. Do I Need to Pay Twice?
Question
The community charges every family money each month for the upkeep of the town.
This is of course in addition to municipal property tax,
synagogue tax,
security tax,
and of course there are activities that also require payment.
With the money they collect they buy seedlings, pay a gardener, fertilize, and water the public areas, and that is how everything is green and יפה
In the end there is also produce; in this case, the town’s sekhakh. The town also pays, again from our money, for a professional trimmer, and there is sekhakh.
But instead of letting whoever wants to benefit from the sekhakh that was planted, grown, and maintained with our money, as is customary in many places in Israel, in our town they do not.
Rather, anyone who wants it has to pay 5 shekels for each branch (the regular private market price) for sekhakh, so covering one whole sukkah comes to hundreds of shekels every year for sekhakh that is basically ours.
The town claims that the money is not even put back into the town’s budget, but is a “donation” to the youth…
Is this proper?
In the end, this is produce that came fully from our money, so why pay twice?
Answer
Legally, this is certainly permitted. It is just another kind of tax. If they charged you an additional tax in some other form, it would be the same thing. Beyond that, when the town pays a professional trimmer with your money, who told you that this is not the very same money you are paying for the sekhakh? Money is not color-coded. In other places they do not charge because they cover the activity in other ways (they collect higher community taxes); there are no miracles. I assume your town committee is not pocketing the money. At the end of the day, there are activities and they need to be funded.
And more generally, the money and the sekhakh are not yours but the public’s, and the public is entitled, through its representatives, to decide what to do with it. I agree that it does not look good to charge for the sekhakh in order to fund youth activities. But this is normal procedure, because as stated, money is not color-coded.
Discussion on Answer
The money goes as a donation to the youth and does not return to the town budget that funded the tree, the maintenance, the gardener, the spraying, and also the professional trimmer…
In Anatot, about 2,600 years ago, there was a man walking around
who wrote about just such a thing—taking money for a product that is “ours”—a lament:
“We pay money for the water we drink; our wood comes to us at a price.”
It is like charging for parking in blue-and-white zones. The sidewalk and the road are ours and were paved with our money, and now they charge us for using them.