March 31, 2021 at 4:27 p.m.
On Tuesday, vote no to highway robbery
On Tuesday, vote no to highway robbery
Voters in the county will be facing two referenda questions, which, taken together, is the equivalent of asking us to trust someone we trusted before but got fleeced for our faith.
Specifically, the county is asking us to pass an annual $500,000 tax increase for the next decade, and it is also asking voters to politely suggest - suggest, mind you - that the county board cut another $500,000 a year in spending, all to fund county roads and bridges.
That would mean an additional $1 million annually going to our roads, which officials say is needed and which everybody seems to agree is true.
That said, it does not follow - does not follow at all - that we should pass the tax increase. Indeed, voters should emphatically tell the county 'no' by handing the tax increase a resounding defeat.
Conveniently, the tax referendum question is binding, meaning the county must raise taxes if the question passes. However, the directive to cut spending by $500,000 isn't a directive at all because supervisors can choose to ignore it. It's advisory.
As supervisor Jack Sorensen has asked more than once, how many people actually believe the county will follow through and cut spending if the ballot initiative passes?
Here are the two possible scenarios. The spending cut recommendation will pass, but supervisors will balk at cutting anything. They will say voters were deprived of having enough information about specific programs that might be cut and actually wouldn't want any harm to come to this or that specific entity.
They will also say the referendum wasn't a true picture of voter sentiment since so few people vote in spring elections. Or perhaps they will say, OK, we'll cut something but that's going to take a three-year study to determine what can be eliminated. Then, after three years, they will throw up their hands and say every expense is necessary and, gosh, we wanted to follow the voters' will but it just can't be done.
The second scenario is, the question fails, for whatever reasons, and the big spenders on the board, liberals and supposed conservatives alike, will thunder that the people have spoken and no cuts to county spending will ever again be made.
Either way, so long as the current board remains in place, so long as county board chairman Dave Hintz remains, there aren't going to be any spending cuts. That's the history. That's the present. And that's the future, unless a new board is elected.
Meanwhile, if the tax increase passes, supervisors will say it's not enough and will clamor for more.
Throughout this debate, supervisor Scott Holewinski has taken a curious and we think illogical position on the referenda. On the one hand, he wants the county to make the spending cuts, and to his credit he has pushed for those cuts for many years.
Curiously, though, he also supports the tax increase. While we agree with Mr. Holewinski on many things, he is wrong on this one. Let's take a look at why.
Basically, Mr. Holewinski argues, this is a compromise, a win-win for everybody. The big spenders initially wanted a million bucks in tax increases, and this compromise whittles it down to $500,000, with anther $500,000 in spending cuts.
Again, though, that thinking is flawed because only the tax increase is binding. How many of us would sign a contract in which we agree to pay someone a certain price, up front and with no conditions, and in return the other party agrees to maybe think about doing something, you know, if it doesn't rain and the government admits there are Lizard people living in the White House.
How many would sign that contract? Well, that's the question to consider because that's basically the contract Oneida County wants us to sign on Tuesday.
But wait! Mr. Holewinski says. If we don't approve the tax increase, the big spenders will simply borrow the money anyway and taxpayers will still have to pay but with interest to boot.
We're not so sure about that. To be sure, the county board has resisted any and all efforts to cut wasteful spending, but the board has been just as adamant in recent years about shooting down proposals to borrow money, even for what have been considered critical capital improvement projects.
They could borrow, of course, but, if the voters shoot down the tax increase, they would be defiantly ignoring the will of the electorate. The explicit message of such a vote would obviously be that taxpayers don't want a tax increase for roads, but the implicit message would be that they don't want supervisors simply turning around and taxing them anyway through bonding.
Supervisors will ignore that message at their own peril.
At the end of the day, Mr. Holewinski unwittingly makes the strongest argument for voting down the tax increase. Over and over again, he has correctly called out the county board for never taking the debt service for the law enforcement center off the tax rolls once the debt was paid.
So where we taxpayers once spent $1 million a year to pay for the new jail and complex - he says it's $2 million - since 2007 the county has kept on taking that $1 million every year and has been spending it for other things.
He thinks that's outrageously wrong, and we agree.
But the response should not be to raise taxes by another half-million a year when we are already so badly overtaxed. It's easy to see that the diversion of the law enforcement debt service went everywhere except for the place it should have gone to - to road construction, with the surplus beyond that returned to taxpayers.
Taxpayers can never recoup the wasteful spending of years past but it can stop it in its tracks. Safe to say, recklessly handing this irresponsible board another $500,000 certainly won't do it. Indeed, it will only encourage the big spenders.
Similarly, while we agree with supervisor Billy Fried that the tax increase is fraught with problems, we urge against any temptation to fiddle with a sales tax, with a wheel tax, with borrowing, or any other tax increase so long as the county refuses to cut spending.
Actually, the solution to the entire problem is pretty simple. Mr. Fried says the county's general fund can be tapped short-term until a long-term solution is found. We agree, so first do that.
The long-term solution is to make the spending cuts the county should have made more than a decade ago. As Mr. Holewinski has shown us, we have been overtaxed by at least $1 million a year for 13 years. So, what would the county have had to cut if that $1 million in ill-gotten gains hadn't existed, if it had come off the tax rolls when it should have?
Compile that list, and there's your spending cuts of at least $1 million. And wouldn't you know it? That's exactly the amount the county says it needs for highways.
The solution is right in front of every supervisor's face. They should take the windfall that superfluous and nonessential programs have illegitimately enjoyed for more than a decade and transfer it to our highways.
Those supervisors who do not cooperate should themselves be cut in the next election.
Everyone agrees we need $1 million a year for our roads. On Tuesday, taxpayers should demand that supervisors take it from the existing county budget and not from our pockets.
The latter would be highway robbery, literally.
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