While the issue has become bogged down in undoubtedly important but almost unfathomable legal technicalities, a case just heard by our Supreme Court could fundamentally change the way our four counties conduct their business.

The case has its origins in a Kaua'i County Charter amendment passed with strong voter support in 2004 that puts severe limits on property tax collections. It rolls back taxes for long-term residents and caps overall increases in property taxes to 2 percent a year.

County officials objected, arguing this was a back-door attempt to limit property taxes by initiative, which is not allowed under the county charter. For the moment, the plan is on hold.

If all this has echoes of the famous California Proposition 13, which capped property taxes, it should. The theme is the same and, in fact, many of the players are the same. Prop. 13 is probably the most famous "taxpayer revolt" effort in recent history. Among those who stepped in to help defend the tax limit measure against opposition from local and state government officials was the Pacific Legal Foundation.

The same group has entered into the Kaua'i fray, siding with the taxpayers who supported the charter amendment.

There are some interesting legal niceties in this case that will become fodder for law school classes for years to come.

The first is the oddity that the complainant in this case is the County of Kaua'i, which effectively sued itself to block implementation of the charter amendment. County officials argued that the budgetmaking process would be in chaos if property tax collections (which provide the lion's share of the budget) were arbitrarily limited. Pacific Legal Foundation lawyers essentially said, come on, county lawyers should be defending this new law, not attacking it.

The other legal complexity is that there is confusion about who is "the county" when it comes to deciding how property taxes should be imposed. Is it the council and the administration, or is it the residents and taxpayers of Kaua'i?

All interesting questions.

But stepping back from the legal technicalities (which in fact may settle this) is the larger issue of whether counties can operate effectively and in the public's best interest with what are, at the end of the day, arbitrary limits on how much can be collected in taxes.

California's experience after Prop. 13 has been decidedly mixed. Longtime homeowners were given substantial relief from taxes that were soaring due to a vibrant economy and booming property values. But the institutions that depended on property taxes for their lifeblood, primarily public schools, entered into a prolonged slump. Families scrambled, raising money on the side for their public schools, in effect, taxing themselves in another way. There was a substantial migration away from cash-strapped public schools to private institutions.

Now, that specific situation does not apply in Kaua'i, or in any of our counties for that matter. The state pays for our schools.

But if we enter into an era of citizen-limited tax increases, will we be willing to accept the natural and inevitable diminishment of the level of public services our counties provide? That's the real issue in this case.

Reach Jerry Burris at jburris@honoluluadvertiser.com.