In asserting that the time has come to end property taxes in South Carolina, S.C. Sen. Ray Cleary, R-Murrells Inlet, effectively is declaring war on the independence of local government. True, he doesn't say as much in his letter on the subject on today's editorial page.

But in South Carolina, counties, cities, school districts, special taxing districts and other units of local government rely mainly on the property tax to finance their operations.

Nowhere in his letter does Cleary suggest an alternative, locally controlled form of revenue councils and school boards could use once property tax abolition is accomplished. Based on Cleary's letter, and on the sentiments of other anti-property-tax S.C. legislators who have studied the issue this summer, it appears that legislators would finance schools, public works, public safety and other local government functions with revenue raised through Columbia. Local councils' and school boards' roles would be reduced to deciding how to spend the money that legislators, in their beneficence, provide them.

If such a scenario became reality, the local control that county councils fought for and finally won only a few decades ago would be gone. S.C. school boards, which only recently achieved emancipation from control by local legislative delegations, would again quiver under the legislative thumb - albeit in a different way.

That might be OK if not for two structural flaws to legislative control of local affairs that no amount of statutory tinkering can overcome:

Locally elected council and school board members are far better suited than legislators to identifying local needs and raising money, via local taxes, to meet them.

Locally elected council and school board members who fulfill these roles poorly are easily identified and can be called to account for their shortcomings in local elections. Because legislators make their decisions in Columbia, it's much easier for them to duck accountability for their mistakes.

Cleary is not wrong to join the legislative cabal that sees assuaging the anguish of aggrieved property owners as fertile political ground. But until those legislators propose locally controlled tax alternatives for county councils, municipal councils and boards of education, serious South Carolinians will have no choice but regard them as political opportunists.