The Town passed its budget for 2012-2013 this past week and decided to earmark $350,000 of the Mi-Connection interlocal agreement windfall for "capital projects". This is just a bit different from what was originally reported which was the entire windfall would go to replenish the Town's savings account. Some of this decision is due to a State restriction which allows only 5% of a budget to go to fund balance in a given year. However, the decision to plan the rest for more spending projects is a concious decision by the Board to do that rather than give any relief to taxpayers.
Much of the money earmarked for the "fund ballance"will actually be needed in the future to pay back Mooresville for the loans Davidson is getting to fully cover the Town's portion of the Mi-Connection subsidy - meaning it's not really savings. This year Davidson will need over $700,000 from Mooresville - meaning the $400,000 going into "contingency" actually is not being used to replenish our "fund ballance". One could say it is being set asside to pay our future accumulating debt to Mooresville, and not even all of that.
End result? Rather than freeing up money to lower our tax rate, the Town will use $350k of this money on "capital" projects all while sinking us into further long-term debt.
If you live in multi-family or townhome housing in Davidson you also likely received an unexpected surprise related to your trash service fees. Residents in multi-family housing using dumpsters received a "tax" increase (albeit a small one) as part of this budget. If you live in this type of multi-family housing your solid waste fee went up 15 dollars per year. A much bigger deal hit roughly 300 homes when the Town discovered they had not been billed for last year's $201/home solid wast fee. Almost a year after implementation the Town discovered that they were about $60,000 short on the expected trash fees. An investigation with the County discovered that most of this related to a glitch in how these were set up in the county system. Per and email from Cindy Jones, the Town's new Finance manager, these are mostly with townhomes in the St Albans and Summerswalk neighborhoods, but others are spread throughout Town as well. Impacted residents will receive a whopping $402 bill this year as the ordinance allows the Town to go back a year to cover the mistake. That may be what is "fair", but that's little consolation to the people receiving the bill. Especially, when this should have been discovered much earlier in the process.
Here's the irony of these situations with the budget. The trash fee was implemented as a way to raise more money to fund the annual bailouts of Mi-Connection. However, when Mi-Connection issue gets some relief, the relief is not to passed onto taxpayers in the form of lower fees. Instead, many residents will actually be receiving bigger bills this year.
Salt, meet wound.
Budget article from DavidsonNews.net.
It is actually illegal for a municipality to raise a fee for one service to cover a shortfall of another. The mandate to all government is to provide sevices at the cost of providing them. It is time to call the state U. S. Attorney's Office.
ReplyDeleteActually, the fee that's being raised this year is going to cover the service the - trash pickup at multi-family housing.
ReplyDeleteHowever, this entire service used to be covered under the general fund via property taxes making the whole thing a tax increase from what was done previously.
I see your point that raising "taxes" by implementing this fee could be construed as increasing taxes from one service to fund another (i.e. Mi-Connection), but I am not sure where the line is in that.