Serving in local government has never been a cakewalk. The S.C. Supreme Court just made sure it will be more difficult in the years ahead.

In ruling that the city of Myrtle Beach improperly calculated property taxes after a 1998 countywide reassessment, the court delivered a body blow to virtually every taxing jurisdiction in South Carolina.

In effect, the court said Myrtle Beach gave itself an undeserved - read that as illegal - tax increase when calculating its property-tax rollback after reassessment. Under state law, local governments aren't supposed to benefit from reassessment but must proportionately reduce the mill levies.

Myrtle Beach, like many jurisdictions in South Carolina, projected tax collections at less than 100 percent of all taxable property, thus justifying less of a millage rate drop than theoretically should have occurred. Had it not done this, the city says, tax collections would have fallen short of budgeted needs because only about 86 percent pay their property tax.

The lawsuit, brought by former Horry County Administrator Linda Angus and supported at the time by Mayor Mark McBride, seemed to suggest some sort of chicanery on the part of the City Council members and city administrators.

Don't believe it. Myrtle Beach was budgeting the way many S.C. jurisdictions budget. The procedure has been endorsed by the state Department of Revenue and the Municipal Association of South Carolina.

In the case of Myrtle Beach, some $500,000 ultimately was returned to taxpayers, albeit not necessarily the same taxpayers. That fact troubled some justices. But we like the words of Associate Justice Costa Pleicones, who said that municipal budgeting "is an inexact science, relying as it must upon estimates and 'best guesses.'"

It is an inexact science, and the more so in a community where property values take quantum leaps from one reassessment to the next.