I do not understand why City Council is so hell bent on repealing the Law of Supply and Demand.  Throughout history, governments around the world have tried this and they have failed every time.  The closest to succeed were the Communist governments of the Soviet Union and China, but they only managed to drive their free economies underground where supply and demand flourished.  Eventually, even these governments realized the folly of their efforts and returned to at least a partial capitalist free market system.  Now our city government is trying to perpetrate the same foolishness that those governments did.  And this is not their first attempt: It was tried with 2005-091, the seafood Bill, again a couple of years ago with the Local Preferences bill and this past year with the Residency Requirements bill.   All of these bills were ultimately withdrawn.

The Law of Supply and Demand cannot be repealed  because it was not legislated into existence.  The Law of Supply and Demand is manifested by the actions of people who produce, trade and consume goods.   Passage of 2010-856 will be nothing more than a disruption of a working market system, causing higher prices, reduced production, reduced trade and reduced consumption, none of which, does one want in a down economy.  Think about it.

I call on this City Council to abandon this legislation and then advise those constituents who initiated this movement that they are now free to compete.

Joe Andrews
Candidate for City Council, District 12

Last Tuesday night was a tremendous victory in the fight for the Concerned Taxpayer’s of Duval County. This was the most attended council that I can EVER remember seeing. The vote was deadlocked 9 – 9 as amendments for sensible budget cuts (things that Taxpayers should not spend one penny on) were ignored. They went on until 3 am last night and “recessed” until 11:00 am today. Although the City Council ultimately voted to raise your taxes today, they deliberated more than any other budget hearing in history.

Despite some unusual tomfoolery of “power failures”, you stayed so that you could be heard.

Thanks to all the First Coast Tea Party, The Republican Liberty Caucus, Libertarian Party of Duval County, Concerned Taxpayers of Duval County, Ferret Tax Protesters, small business owners and working families who came out to fight. This would not have been possible without each and every one of you!

Again, this was a huge victory for us. We fought last year, the year before that, the year before that, etc. It has become increasingly difficult for the tomfoolery to continue. More and more people come out and scrutinize how our hard earned money is being wasted on special interests for corporate, social and cultural welfare. The City has no business picking winners and losers in any of these areas. .

In the past, the righteous anger of the people over continued tax increases to fund special interests on the right and the left has been quickly forgotten. However, this year is different. WE WILL HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE IN THE SPRING ELECTIONS.

We have targeted the Habitual Tax Offenders for “unelection” in the spring with our operation Recidivism. The final details and logistics are being worked out now.

We have focused on those who are up for re-election in the spring and are not term limited. The list is being finalized now based on past voting records and other research we have been conducting to root out special interest ties and influence.

Also, we have in mind to target Habitual Tax Offenders who are term limited for City Council when they run for other political offices. WE WILL NOT FORGET.

Now, more than ever, all the groups that fight waste and corruption must continue to work for this common goal. It is perilous to let the special interests divide our common goal of fighting for the Taxpayer.

Please stay tuned for more information at:

www.teamtaxpayer.com

Best regards,

Victor L. Wihelm Jr
President Concerned Taxpayers Duval County

• Unemployment in Duval County and Florida is at a record high level! (Florida Times Union 3/26/2010)
• Floridians’ personal income has taken a hit and is now near the bottom of the nation! (Jacksonville Business Journal 3/25/2010)
• Unemployment continues to rise! (Jacksonville Business Journal 7/16/2010)
• Now, Mayor John Peyton wants to convince City Council to increase his three new taxes and the property tax rate again!
• Our garbage tax has already been doubled!
• No more tax hikes!

In 2007, Peyton broke his promise not to raise taxes “on his watch” with the creation of three new taxes.

In 2008, Peyton and the City Council expanded spending with the new Jacksonville Journey entitlement program.

In 2009, Peyton broke his promise again with increased property taxes in the middle of the worst economy in decades.

Taxes and government spending in Jacksonville are at an all time high. The Jacksonville economy simply can not afford another tax increase by Peyton and the City Council.

It’s time to end the Jacksonville Journey, Jacksonville Children’s Commission, and Jacksonville Economic Development Commission and let the taxpayers decide for themselves in which charities and economic development they wish to participate.

Contact your council members by phone or e-mail.

Remember to show up in force on September 28, 2010 for the Team Taxpayer Tailgate Party!  For more information, go to the Concerned Taxpayers meetup site.

Here is a budget proposed by the Concerned Taxpayers of Duval County.  You can read more about this budget in the article in the Jacksonville Liberty Journal (page 1 and 6) that further explains the rationale used to develop it.  We need real spending cuts, not tax rate increases!

The City’s Budget vs. What We Can Afford

If you do not agree, consider the Florida Times Union story on the Equal Business Opportunity office. Apparently, productivity for this office was measured in number of websites viewed per hour by its employees rather than in anything useful to the taxpayers who are footing its bill. Not surprisingly, a sharp reduction in staff who seemed to not having anything better to do with their time was recommended by the Inspector General’s office. We couldn’t agree more.

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

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

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.

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?

First, we need to ponder is if there is a market for downtown living.  Despite what the movie Field of Dreams suggests, “if you build it, he will come” doesn’t necessarily work.   The United States’ economic graveyard is full of companies that have failed to understand their markets and found themselves in bankruptcy court despite all their efforts to get out of the holes in which they dug for themselves.  So our city leaders believe that 10,000 people living downtown are needed to attract retail development. But if even if we build the condominiums and apartments needed to house that many people and all the shops and restaurants needed to support them, will 10,000 people want to live downtown?  Maybe, the many attempts to jump start downtown development in Jacksonville have failed because there is not a large enough market for downtown living in Jacksonville.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that 10,000 people want to live downtown.  What is stopping them from doing so?  According to the Florida Times Union, approximately 2,600 people already live downtown.  That surely should be a good start towards growing the downtown area.  There may not be many retail establishments in downtown Jacksonville at the beginning, but this should change as more people pour into the area and create a need for a larger retail sector unless there are government policies that hinder growth in that sector and therefore hinder any further increase in the downtown population.  We should at least ask this question before we pick the pockets of Duval County taxpayers in another failed attempt to subsidize downtown development that may be too expensive to build due to regulations and taxes.  Also, according to the Florida Times Union, government agencies (federal, state and local) own nearly a third of downtown Jacksonville.  Could it be that they grabbed the choicest real estate in the downtown area for themselves and this is hindering downtown development?

Now let’s assume again that 10,000 people want to live downtown and there are no government barriers to doing so, should city government subsidize downtown development?  The problem with government subsidizing any activity is that it inevitably leads to inefficient usage of resources.  In the real world of unsubsidized commerce, businesses have to keep their expenses down and their revenues up.  Otherwise, they go out of business.  Subsidizing business activities reduces the incentives to do either or both of those.  Also, if business owners have to put up less of their own money when starting development projects, they are more willing to take bigger risks since they do not stand to lose as much money as they would if they are on the hook for the entire investment.  Finally, will the downtown development project pay for itself or will it continue to come back periodically to the public trough when it encounters rough times?

One suspects that the motivation for downtown development could come from the smart growth mantra that is so popular within the urban planning community.  Smart growth emphasizes compact development, mass transit, walkability and bike friendliness, mixed use areas (shops and office buildings in close proximity to residential neighborhoods), etc.  Much  of this is echoed in the Florida Times Union series on downtown development. Whatever the merits of smart growth, one would hope that downtown development would not be used as a stealth strategy for pushing smart growth on a city that is not as concerned about urban sprawl as the planners are.

The reason that free markets work is that they adapt to the changing needs of consumers.  If people want to live downtown in significant numbers, the market will respond to that need and downtown Jacksonville will grow.  The involvement of government in downtown development will only distort the market response and will lead to an outcome that satisfies the politicians and planners but not the consumers.

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.