Clueless?

(or... When Mayors Attack!)

You, the voters, are clueless. If you are thinking about voting for the Property Tax Amendment (Amendment #1) on January 29, you are clueless. You were smart enough to vote into office the elected officials who are now calling you clueless, but none-the-less, you are clueless.

At last night's City of Kissimmee Commission meeting, Mayor Swan angrily argued against comments made by Commissioner Irizarry in a discussion about the possibility of the Property Tax Cut passing. "If anybody is foolish enough to think that $850,000 dollars reduced from our budget is not going to affect city services, then they, sir, are clueless," Mayor Swan spoke against Commissioner Irizarry's contention that many voters may be for this amendment, and that if the City was going to take Access Osceola air time to "educate" the public on how bad this amendment is, then they might also want to publish information from those who are in favor of it. It sounded to us like Commissioner Irizarry was advocating for a debate between local and state officials such as Florida State Representative Attkisson who has been pushing the amendment. We are not sure why, in the United States of America, open debate and alternate points of view would be dubbed clueless, but we would have to disagree.

The problem the voters of Florida face right now is a lack of real and honest information. This is a difficult issue to vote on because as voters we know that neither the state or local governments can be trusted. Issue after issue and headline after headline have shown us that neither group is capable of defending our tax dollars in a heroic way. From bad investments with a slush fund at the state level to round-about fountains on our city streets, both sides have failed in earning the public trust. Now that the day of voting draws near, instead of anyone working to provide honest information to the voters, all we see are union scare tactics and angry mayors.

Mayor Swan is correct in saying that "city services" will be cut if the city loses $850,000 dollars from its general fund. The problem with the argument is what does city government believe is a "service" and are they really services that government should be involved with? Instead of deciding on budgets based on department goal sheets, maybe we should be deciding budgets on department need-to-function sheets. The citizens of this state are faced with this same decision in their daily lives, and we believe government should face the same decisions as well. And to Commissioner Van Meter who believes that the public just needs to understand how hard it is to run a city with a limited budget, try understanding how hard it is to scrape money together to feed a young family living and working in the economic climate of your city.

As the vote draws closer, we cannot tell you how to vote on this issue. We have to agree with Commissioner Gemskie that it does not make sense to vote for a piece of bad legislation. At the same time all of us know that if we do not force local governments to control spending, they will not. Worse yet, they may take the defeat of the property tax amendment as a mandate to spend. As far as the challenge that Commissioner Gemskie has thrown out about showing him in the budget where the waste is, we do that on this blog on a weekly basis. We would also like to remind him that what he is holding is a budget summary and not the full budget detail, where "waste" would be found.

We do not know how this vote is going to go, but we know for sure that a grumpy mayor lashing out at those who do not fall into step is not proof of the consensus builder that we were promised.