May 24, 2006 The Perfect Tax Storm (Part II)

Budget Meeting of the Hamblen County Commission 5-23-06.

Several votes were taken yesterday to approve some of the department budgets for 06-07.

I moved that we take each budget under advisement--something we have done in the past--until we have looked at the entire budget.

I think it is a wise thing to do because you talk to the department head, but you wait to give final approval until the whole budget has been looked at and, most importantly, until better updated numbers are in front of you.

[We've already seen a $1 million dollar spending error on May 16 as reported in my post yesterday and a $200,000+ revenue error that was brought out yesterday. The $200,000+ revenue error was where the highway revenue budget showed the county receiving "state aid money" but, as Road Superintendent Barry Poole informed us, that money will not be coming in and should not have been put in as revenues.]

Instead of taking the budgets under advisement, a majority of commissioners voted to approve each department's spending budget one after the other in a piecemeal fashion. What will it all add up to in the end--when you put the pieces together? Another deficit budget.

That's where the Perfect Tax Storm is swirling big time. The Perfect Tax Storm is what happens when you keep spending more than you take in and you keep approving deficit budgets. That's what Hamblen County has been doing for the past several years.

If the revenue and expenditure figures do not change a lot in the next few weeks and if we keep approving all the spending that is in front of us, then we will be looking at a deficit general fund budget for 06-07. We will have slowly approved spending more than we expect to take in.

And that would be a deficit budget before there is any talk at all about pay raises or the school budget!

It's full steam ahead to approve all the spending increases and then saddle the taxpayers with higher tax rates this year on top of last year's higher property appraisals--the old double whammy right in the pocketbook.

The engineer and his crew are on board, and the taxpayers are going to be taken for a real ride this year!