Raising taxes is easy part
Soon, everyone who owns a piece of Fayette County will be receiving a tax bill. And it promises to be enormous. There will be ranting and raving. And gnashing and wailing. There will be a few “How dare they do this?” thrown in.
But to whom should the ire fall?
The direct beneficiaries of indignation would of course be the three county commissioners – Angela Zimmerlink, Joe Hardy and Vince Vicites – for voting to hike property taxes 60 percent. They are the easiest of targets. But they didn’t do this on a whim.
Most of the money is needed to pay for mismanagement of county finances that has accumulated perhaps for decades. In fact, the current crop of commissioners can’t even agree on how deeply the county is in debt or how all of it accumulated. A newer commissioner like Zimmerlink attempts to pass off most of the debt spending as carryover amounts from past administrations. A seasoned commissioner like Vicites will shoulder some past debt but equally place the blame for overspending by the now Republican-controlled commissioners. At this point, does either theory matter?
What does matter is what the commissioners – all three of them – do to resolve this problem because it certainly won’t be solved in one year of mega tax bills. It will take several years to move the county into the black. And that is only possibly if the commissioners confront head-on the dynamics that allowed this to occur. The practice of borrowing from one account to cover the bills from another encourages debt to snowball until it creates a multi-million dollar avalanche.
Few would disagree that this must stop.
But that is only part of the county’s problem. The underlying menace is the lack of good, reliable day-to-day financial data available to the commissioners.
For many administrations, through several elected county controllers, commissioners have blamed the controllers office for not providing accurate, timely numbers. This indeed could be feeding into the problem, but from time to time, the commissioners have said they were adopting systems to circumvent the controller’s office so they would know where the county stood. What has happened to these safeguards?
As difficult as the commissioners claim it was to raise taxes, that is the easy part. Setting the finances right will require a concerted effort in the year to come.