Tonight the Kissimmee City Commission will be working to raise your taxes once again. You will hear the argument from most of the commissioners about what a fee is versus what a tax is, but at the end of the day we all know that taking money from citizens is a tax. Instead of trying to take the focus off of taking more money from the residents by arguing word trivia, just be honest and say, "we are going to take more of your money. "
If we could reach this point of honesty, then we could discuss the merits of the new taxes. First we have the Storm Water fee. This is a fee (tax) that we pay to clean up the storm water run-off into our lakes. This is an important issue to keep our environment healthy and is also something that we must do by state and federal law. The original fee was set too low because the commission at that time wanted to be re-elected and was afraid to raise the tax. So this one needs to be increased. We are doing the work, it needs to be paid for.
The second fee (tax) up for discussion is the Fire Fee, also called the public safety fee. This is a fee that we will all pay that will help generate revenue for the city that might be lost if the state government cuts the property tax rate. What?? So we are not paying this fee to improve public safety? We are just looking to make sure the government has plenty of money? No extra, or better services for the residents to justify the tax, just the same for more money out of our pockets? What if the state does not reduce the property tax, are we doomed to pay the same tax rate and the new fire fee?
2 comments:
The rumor is that Wayne is sending out e-mails with your blog entries and then making comments to those. Guess he figures it is better to let someone else lead for awhile.
What an eye opening meeting that was last night. I guess we learned an awful lot about how much the commission really cares about the charter review committee. Three things really stuck out to me:
1) How can Gemskie be so adamant about not having a former elected official on the committee, and then turn around and make his appointment a former commissioner. Although I think his choice is a very good one, it sure does say a lot about his character.
2) It's very important that the committee has rules and structured guidelines to follow, however, it seems the commission is trying to cherry pick what they want the committee to concentrate on. If you trust the people that have been chosen to be on the committe, let them do the job. Don't handcuff them with things that you don't feel need to be addressed.
3) This commission obviously doesn't feel this is a very important item to even be looking at. They selected the entire committee without even having an application process. I'm not saying that the people that were chosen are bad, but there may have been some other very good applicants if they would have allowed it. It just seemed to me that they were all very proud that they rushed through the process and got everything taken care of in one meeting.
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