A newly resurfaced tax dispute is sparking outrage online after Los Angeles County Assessor Jeff Prang said aircraft-tracking data helped his office locate roughly 1,000 additional planes in the county — even as House Republicans moved to block that same data from being used to collect taxes.
Critics of the Republican push say the proposal would make it even easier for some of the wealthiest people in the country to avoid paying into the communities they rely on.
What happened?
At the center of the fight is language in a House-passed air safety bill. While the bill itself is bipartisan, it contains a provision that, without an owner or operator’s permission, would stop governments from using the Federal Aviation Administration’s aircraft-tracking data to identify private planes “for the purpose of obtaining revenue,” Politico reported.
Prang described the FAA’s Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast Out (ADS-B Out) tracking requirement as a major tool for finding planes that had effectively escaped local tax rolls…