"One can fully understand why officials in Seneca and Cayuga counties took it upon themselves recently to raid so-called smoke shops owned by the Cayuga Native Americans. They've been waiting for years for the state to collect millions in sales taxes that the courts have said the shops should not withhold. The delay was costing them a lot of revenue, and tough times have made that failure even more costly.

But collecting these taxes — the courts have ruled that the state is entitled to the sales taxes on items sold to non-Indians — is an issue that Gov. David Paterson, working with the tribes, must resolve. This is a tax, after all, that the state levies, with the counties obtaining a share of the revenue.

It is up to the state to resolve this conflict, something Govs. George Pataki and, in his brief tenure, Eliot Spitzer proved unable to do. Paterson has made fixing the state's fiscal crisis his first priority. A Cayuga County official estimated that the state was losing as much as $250,000 a week in uncollected sales taxes at the Cayuga shops. Statewide, that's millions of dollars in taxes the state is owed but doesn't collect. If the governor is going to attack the crisis, as he should, he should resolve this issue."

Get the Story:
Editorial: It's state's job to resolve Indian tax issue (The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle 12/7)

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Cayuga Nation heads to court after smokeshop raid (12/1)
County authorities raid Cayuga Nation smoke shops (11/26)