Citizen Think Tank – Garbage In, Garbage Out
How many more times must we suffer through these committees that are nothing but a ruse to get a bunch of Gilbert citizens to demand that the Council pass higher taxes on the rest of us? Answer: As long as Linda “Pelosi” Abbott and her band of left-leaning lackeys are in the Council majority.
The last citizen committee met for several weeks back in 2009. Many of their best recommendations for budget reductions were ignored. Yet, Lefty Linda convinced her little troopers to vote along with her and spend thousands more taxpayer dollars to get Prop 406 to the ballot. It failed. Undaunted, she trotted out this new and improved “citizen” committee. Only this time, the citizens were given 6 hours, 4 of which were spent getting a crash course in municipal budgets, with about 45 minutes of true discussion. Facilitating this elaborate, costly, orchestrated nonsense was another like-minded mother’s little helper, Dick Bowers, former Scottsdale City Manager. He made sure that nobody gained an understanding of the Use Tax. That’s getting into too much detail.
The bottom line is: A tax by any name takes money out of the economy (our pockets) and hands it over to government. Thus, the private economy shrinks and government grows.
And so, the best brains in Gilbert brilliantly came up with a Use Tax and a Primary Property Tax for revenue generation. How original.
Dick Bowers shut me up (twice) when I broke the rules and pointed out the obvious that raising taxes does NOT encourage economic development. (I was not supposed to be critical of others’ ideas.) Incredibly, many of these “others” suggested both of these ideas in the same breath.
This charade would be funny, except that it wastes everybody’s time and causes nothing but grief for the rest of us in Gilbert who clearly do NOT want any more tax increases! We voted down Prop 406 in May 2010. Twenty-five hundred of us signed three petitions to rescind three taxes in August 2009.
Most people don’t mind paying more taxes if they are truly necessary. But not if all the budget reduction ideas haven’t been thoroughly vetted.
Want to hear something really funny? This Citizens Think Tank came up with virtually the same ideas to reduce costs that the Citizens Budget Committee of 2009 came up with! Team Linda didn’t like those reductions then, and they won’t like them now.
Why? Because, like Obama and Pelosi, she and her minions want to ram unwanted tax increases down our throats. Except they want to create the illusion that it’s the citizens demanding higher taxes.
Gilbert’s Town employees have proven that they can run more efficiently than any other community in the State of Arizona! A private corporation would be glowing with pride over that. Gilbert Town employees are smart, industrious, good people. (That’s why I sit with them during Council meetings.) Give them the tools they need, the responsibility and authority to meet performance standards, hold them accountable, and they run circles around the competition.
Gilbert could be the “shining city on the hill,” the leader that other communities follow. But oh no. The majority Council doesn’t take pride in these employees (other than lip service.) Dare to be different? Heck no. Let’s follow the example of communities with bigger deficits than ours. As Jared Taylor aptly put it, “Communities run deficits whether or not they have a primary property tax or a Use Tax. It’s how we control spending that matters.”
Town Employees! Just say NO to Abbott in the General Election. With her gone, you might actually enjoy an evening at home with your families.