Jacksonville City Council members want to hear from you during the following town hall meetings! Let them know that you want no more taxes!
City Council Town Hall Meeting – Districts 7, 9 and 10
Tuesday, March 30, 2010 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
FSCJ Downtown Campus – 401 W. State Street, Jacksonville Florida
City Council Town Hall Meeting – Districts 12 and 14
Thursday, April 08, 2010 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
FSCJ Kent Campus, 3939 Roosevelt Boulevard, Jacksonville Florida
City Council Town Hall Meeting – Districts 8 and 11
Thursday, April 22, 2010 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
FSCJ North Campus, 4501 Capper Road, Jacksonville Florida
City Council Town Hall Meeting – Districts 1, 2, 3 and 13
Thursday, May 06, 2010 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
FSCJ South Campus, 11901 Beach Boulevard, Jacksonville Florida
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2010 will be a tough year for Jacksonville city government. With revenues down, hard choices will need to be made on the spending priorities of city government. Of course, it would be easier for the politicians to avoid these tough decisions by raising your taxes. If you do not want to pay more taxes, here is your opportunity to let them know that they will be held accountable if they avoid the difficult decisions that they were elected to make. Don’t let them take the easy way out by raising your taxes. For more information about the upcoming budget workshops, see the city budget website.
Upcoming Budget Workshops
Thurs., 2/11/10 – 6-8 p.m.
CPAC District 2 Budget Workshop
Blue Cypress Community Center
4012 University Blvd. N.
Sat., 2/27/10 – 9:30-11:30 a.m.
CPAC District 4 Budget Workshop
Cecil Community Center
13531 Lake Newman Drive
Sat., 3/06/10 – 9:30-11:30 a.m.
CPAC District 1 Budget Workshop
Jacksonville Children’s Commission
1095 A. Philip Randolph Blvd.
Thurs., 3/25/10 – 6-8 p.m.
CPAC District 5 Budget Workshop
Clanzel T. Brown Community Center
4545 Moncrief Road
Sat., 4/17/10 – 9:30-11:30 a.m.
CPAC District 3 Budget Workshop
Balis Community Center
1513 LaSalle Street
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“As mayor, I can’t sit idly by. It is my job to help lay the foundation for Jacksonville’s strong post-recession recovery, by creating new job opportunities and a stronger financial foundation, improving our city’s quality of life and ensuring the safety of our citizens.” - Speech given by Mayor John Peyton at Snyder Memorial Church on Jan. 20, 2010.
When you read the above excerpt from Mayor John Peyton’s speech, you get the sense that Peyton has a rather ambitious view of his role as Mayor. Rather than running an efficient government that provides an essential but limited set of services to local taxpayers, Peyton instead want to be the savior of Jacksonville dispensing job opportunities and improved quality of life to everyone like Santa Claus on Christmas day. While this may seem noble to many, you have to question whether Peyton has the godlike powers to make this happen. Cities are complex social organizations that defy top down control by politicians no matter how sincere or self confident they may be. The reason that free markets work is that they do not presume that one person or even a committee of people have the knowledge and available tools to manage the complex web of personal and economic relationships that take place within Jacksonville. Free markets rely on the decentralized decision making by entrepreneurs trying to discover what their customers need and then meeting that need before their competitors beat them to the punch.
Recently, the Jacksonville Charter Revision Commission proposed that the mayor develop a four year strategic plan that includes a “vision statement, mission statement, financial plan, goals and measurements for annual performance reviews”. While strategic planning is important for any organization including city government, we need to be careful to identify what the goal of this foray into strategic planning should be and should not be. It should not be a strategic plan for Jacksonville. Instead, it should be a strategic plan for Jacksonville city government. There is a difference. The former assumes a godlike remolding of a city of 800,000+ people while the latter is more realistic in its desire to do just a few essential things and do them well.
A savior mentality seems to be inherent within the politician psyche. Efficiently provide a limited set of services that the free market finds difficult to duplicate is way too mundane for politicians like Peyton. It is more fun for Peyton to throw around taxpayer money in a vain attempt to transform Jacksonville into his vision of what he thinks that it should be regardless of whether Jacksonville residents want to go along for the ride. My advice to Mayor Peyton is to get the city budget under control without another tax increase, reform the city pension system and leave the quality of life issue to the private sector which is more responsive to its customers than governments tend to be.
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The title of this post is from the song Downtown sung by Petula Clark in the mid 1960s. The song was inspired by composer-arranger Tony Hatch’s visit to New York City in which he extols the vibrant atmosphere of Broadway and Times Square. Having been to New York City, I would agree with this characterization of Manhattan. With its museums, nightspots and Central Park, New York City truly is the city that does not sleep!
If you read the recent Florida Times Union series on downtown Jacksonville, you get a sense that Jacksonville’s political leaders really want to transfer some of that vibrancy to Jacksonville’s city core. According to the Florida Times Union, downtown Jacksonville is essentially dead in the weeknights and weekends and is short on residents and workers. What city leaders envision is a walkable downtown full of shops, restaurants, condominiums and lots of people frequenting and living in them. As usual, this vision requires tax money and city government planning.
Before we go flying off the cliff in our enthusiasm to keep moving forward with this vision, let us pause for a second and ask why we need a vibrant downtown. Even if we agree that the downtown area should be different from what it currently is, is it possible for realize this new vision for downtown? How should we realize this vision? How much taxpayer money are we willing to sink into downtown to realize this vision?
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A fee does the city no good if it doesn’t get paid. That is the issue with the stormwater and garbage fees. According to the Florida Times Union, 17% of the stormwater and garbage fees have not been paid to the city even though it appears to be more like 30% lately. The city would like to reduce this statistic to 5% by adding the fees to your property tax bill. When that happens, failure to pay the fees could get a lien placed on your property. With this motivational trick, the mayor is hoping to persuade Jacksonville residents to pay the unpopular fees.
The up side of putting the fees on the property tax bill is cost savings. The cost savings projected by the Central Operations department is about $737,000 per year. In a tough budget year, that is not exactly chump change. Billing customers is a major expense for businesses which explains why so many businesses like e-mailed billing notices and automatic debits which reduce this cost.
On the other hand, the down side is that the fees become more entrenched as they become easier to collect. Many of us were not happy with the fees mainly because they rolled back the property tax relief provided to us by the Florida Legislature in 2007 and which we taxpayers approved in 2008. Personally and I speak only for myself and not for Concerned Taxpayers, I have no problems with the fees in and of themselves and I actually like the idea of diversifying the city’s revenue base.
However, my problem with the fees is that the political establishment in Jacksonville was not willing to give up its obsession with spending other people’s money even when the Jacksonville taxpayer was clearly being overtaxed. Sometimes, the money is spent on indispensable services like police and fire suppression. Other times, it is spent on government charity and corporate welfare which I believe the taxpayer should not be forced to fund. Until Jacksonville city government restricts its responsibilities to the core functions of government (police, fire suppression, parks, etc) and not whatever pet project some City Council member or Mayor fancies at the moment, I will reject any tax increase that makes hard earned taxpayer money available to politicians to play with. That is especially true in hard times when a failure to pay the fees could lead to the loss of your home.
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Last Tuesday (July 28), the Jacksonville City Council voted on the proposed millage rate for the 2009/2010 city budget. Here is how they voted.
The following City Council members voted to lower your taxes by keeping the millage rate as it currently is, specifically 8.48 mills.
Bill Bishop, Richard Clark, John Crescimbeni, Daniel Davis, Johnny Gaffney, Art Graham, Ray Holt, Glorious Johnson, Denise Lee, Clay Yarborough
The following City Council members voted to raise your taxes by 12 percent as proposed by Mayor Peyton.
Reggie Brown, Michael Corrigan, Ronnie Fussell, Kevin Hyde, Warren Jones, Stephen Joost, Don Redman, Art Shad, Jack Webb
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Well, budget season is now upon us in Jacksonville. In his recent budget address, Mayor John Peyton asked for a 12 percent increase in our millage rate. According to Peyton, without this tax hike, we will have to make deep cuts in services vital to the Jacksonville taxpayer. We are talking about closing fire stations. Parks will become jungles without adequate landscaping. Our streets will be overflowing with criminals if the Jacksonville Journey is not funded for another year. Peyton’s speech enters the world of hyperbole when he stated “Is it your plan to shut down government?”. Chicken Little is no longer saying that the sky is falling. Instead, he just threw up his wings and left town.
What makes the budget process insane is that in a scant two weeks after the budget was unveiled, the City Council must decide what the initial millage rate will be for the city budget. Yes, that is two weeks to study the budget and determine if a millage rate increase is needed or whether more cuts in the budget are possible. Of course, the millage rate can be set lower later once budgets cuts have been identified. But once the genie is let out of the bottle by giving the mayor his millage rate increase, reducing it could be harder to do this once the mayor gets the momentum moving in his direction.
However, if we do not want the millage rate increase and we do not want the mayor’s three fees, we have to identify what to cut in the budget. The worst thing that we can do is to cut say 10 percent from everything in the budget. Not everything is equal in the budget. Public safety and roads are a far higher priority than the Jacksonville Economic Development Commission and the Cultural Council. Prioritizing city spending is crucial as we must cut from the budget those expenditures that are superfluous to its city’s central mission of providing essential services utilized by the vast majority of the public that cannot be provided by the private sector.
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