Wednesday, June 18, 2003

In its headline article of last week, The Citizen reported that the county commission had voted to freeze all hiring for both the sheriff's department and the clerk of superior court, during the coming fiscal year. That was done in the face of requests for 37 new positions by the sheriff, and 11 new positions by the superior court clerk.

Most of us as members of the public are ill-equipped to second guess our county commissioners, who have the benefit of county personnel and outside consultants who can provide them expert accounting help, at taxpayer expense. Thus we tend to keep quiet.

Nonetheless, we are right to be suspicious about a lot of what these commissioners and other elected officials do.

Consider the situation involving the superior court clerk, for instance. She says her office has been swamped with new real estate filings. That's believable.

There has been a lot of mortgage refinancing in recent months, to take advantage of lower interest rates, and that produces court filings. The problem here is that each filing comes with a check for $10 or more for the county. Thus, if the county takes money for these filings, it would make sense to consider the revenue side and to provide adequate personnel to get the job done. It is not tax money coming from the general taxpayers which pays for this service. If the court clerk brings in the money, give her the personnel.

The situation with the sheriff is not too different. The sheriff's law enforcement efforts do provide court fines and other court revenue. Thus one ought to look at the revenue-producing aspect of that department's operations, as well as at the payroll costs.

So perhaps our commissioners are simply being pennywise and pound foolish in these two instances.

The Citizen shows how the forthcoming county budget would cause a tax rate drop of .29 mill in the unincorporated part of the county, and of 1.33 mill in the cities. Last December we saw our commissioners give away a very large part of the county's local 1-percent sales tax to the cities for 10 more years to come, amidst expressed fears that the cities would otherwise have to raise their citizens' property taxes.

Under the new budget the cities could now raise their tax by 1.04 mill this fall, and their citizens would still overall enjoy the .29 mill reduction with which unincorporated county residents will have to be satisfied.

This shows our commissioners' sales tax giveaway to the cities was not justified, and we'll have to live with their mistake for 10 years. Gloating comes naturally to politicians, but I seriously doubt our commissioners are doing the good job they like to think they are.

One group we have to watch out for is the school board. These people spend over twice as much as the county government, and they show little understanding of key accounting concepts. Our economy is in bad shape, we have high unemployment, mortgage foreclosures are up, and yet these folks are oblivious to all that.

Helped by decreasing interest rates, property values are going up much faster than incomes, yet published reports show the school board is intent on milking increasing property values for all the tax they're worth, conveniently forgetting these taxes are paid out of shriveling incomes.

Another article in The Citizen points out that every elected official in the county claims to embrace the GOP platform. The key word there is "claim." I thought that under the GOP Contract with America we were to balance the federal budget, and the disillusionment with that part of the platform is big. Political labels are used the better to fool us. Let us judge our officials for what they do, not what they claim.

Claude Y. Paquin

Fayette County, Ga.

cypaquin@msn.com