 - Court backs dry cleaning sales tax law_files/printme_header.gif)
Midlands businessman's lawsuit fails on 3-2 vote by S.C. justices
BY JACOB JORDAN
Associated Press
COLUMBIA--The South Carolina Supreme Court barely upheld a law Monday requiring dry cleaners to pay sales tax, and in a sharply worded dissent Chief Justice Jean Toal called many of the 61 exemptions to the sales tax code "whimsical."
Midlands dry cleaner Ed Robinson sued because he said the state unfairly taxes his industry, and asked the state's high court to rule whether the 1959 law allowing the exemptions was unconstitutional.
The court voted 3-2 to uphold the law and the exemptions that does not include dry cleaners. But in her dissenting opinion, Toal scolded the Legislature for allowing a lengthy list of tax exemptions that has expanded over the past few decades.
"Although this court ruled in 1951 that the then 19 exemptions to the sales tax were not a 'tyrannical exercise of arbitrary power,' it is in my view that they would conclude that 61 exemptions would rise to that level," Toal wrote in her opinion, in which acting justice Diane Goodstein concurred.
In the opinion, Toal said if she had been in the majority she would have ordered a lower court to determine whether the sales tax exemption law is legal.
Robinson, who operates six dry-cleaning businesses, has said South Carolina is among only about a half-dozen states that charge sales tax on dry cleaning.
"I'm quite disappointed. I still feel like we had a good case, and obviously two justices thought the same thing" said Robinson.
Associate justices E.C. Burnette, James Moore and John Waller agreed with a lower court's decision saying Robinson failed to show the exemptions are unconstitutional.
Robinson said providing exemptions for some services and not for others may be arbitrary and sometimes don't make sense economically, such as providing exemptions for dental prosthetic devices but not for wheelchairs.
But "the fact a classification may result in an inequity or may be unwise in an economic sense does not render it unconstitutional," Burnette wrote for the majority.
Robinson has said the law singles out the dry cleaning industry from all other service providers.
In court papers, the state Revenue Department said the lower court has ruled that sales tax can be charged on dry cleaning because, unlike other service providers, dry cleaners are exempt from sales taxes on purchases of expensive machinery and supplies.
Click here to return to story:
http://www.charleston.net/stories/101403/bus_14dry.shtml