If you want to read Dan Telvock and Karen Bolipata’s 300-plus words on the Spotsylvania Joint School-Board/Board of Supervisors meeting, feel here (Free Lance-Star), but trust me, you don’t have to do it.
If you want to know just how little the fourteen elected officials accomplished on Tuesday night - the county budget already calls for a 6-cent property tax increase, the school board wanted another 5 cents on top of that - just read this line (emphasis added):
During the almost-two-hour meeting, they never discussed cuts.
Are we really supposed to believe that a $444 million budget (and that’s without the extra the school board wants) has no efficiencies whatsoever?
Look, I know a few of the supervisors; a couple of them are my friends, and I have no doubt they are earnest people trying to do what’s best for the county. However, if not one of them can even mention cuts (although at least Gary Jackson seemed to hint at them in his box quote), then we are destined for a crippling tax increase that could drive homeowners out and keep more from coming in.
Spotsylvania County has been debating housing supply (otherwise known as “growth” - note the Mary Lee Carter brouhaha) for so long that I fear we are forgetting the need to mind residential demand. If said demand plummets, so do our housing values.
There is no reason the county cannot equalize the tax rate this year. It would require $9 million in savings, or less than 2.5% of the budget. I was able to find over $10 million in less than a week (as the folks who attended the Spotsy GOP meeting can attest - I’ll have the details for the folks who couldn’t be there soon) and it would send a signal to the rest of the region that we take our taxpayers’ concerns and property values seriously.
I watched about an hour of that insincere butt-kissing fest.
I’ve never seen a room so full of people willing to either 1) state the obvious repeatedly, 2) NOT step up to the plate with ANY sign of leadership or IDEAS, 3) Placate or sidestep the actual PURPOSE of this meeting which is to come to a solution that works for everyone else (it was more of a painfully-polite social tea party than a work session), 4) PARROT JERRY HILL
WAKE UP SPOTSYLVANIANS- THEY’RE SPENDING YOUR MONEY LIKE THERE’S NO TOMORROW!
DJ- you found $10m in one week huh? I’m not surprised. There’s probably half that in the leather couch cushions of the school’s headquarters building…. you know the place I’m talking about- where all the people with secure jobs over $150,000 work who get raises every year of 5%-25% while the rest of the county employees struggling to keep up with the TAXES alone were notified of a pay-freeze.
That’s management at least. It’s not always nice or pretty, but it’s NECESSARY to maintain FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY WITH OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY.