I wrote earlier that our system of government is supposed to have “checks and balances.” I said that a county commissioner takes an oath to be responsible for, and to control and manage the assets owned by the taxpayers.
Not the county commissioners, the sheriff, the clerk of the court, the district attorney, the tax commissioner nor any staff people own any county property. You do. You own every building, vehicle, road, firearm, sign, desk, chair and pencil and all of the cash or cash instruments that are in the county’s name or were purchased with county (your) money. If anyone tries to tell you differently, they are wrong or giving you misinformation.
If anything costs the county money, it costs you money and it should be for your benefit and service, not for some politician or county employee.
There is a well-known tactic of many politicians. They give you $100. They get it by taking $.01 from each of 10,000 other people; the idea is that they’ve made you happy and the others probably don’t notice.
Let me give you an example. So that I don’t add any fuel to other current fires, I will use our tax commissioner as my example. He has written to the paper recently that the county commission hasn’t let him use credit cards for online vehicle registration renewal.
We did have a problem. You all know that credit card services are not free. When you use a credit card at a store, the store pays a fee to the credit card company. Since “the county” has no money of its own, but only has your money, this would mean that you would pay this fee.
So, in order to make it more convenient for someone to pay online, all of the people who did NOT pay online would pay the fee for those who did. The commission didn’t think that this was fair!
We asked Tax Commissioner George Wingo to go and find out how we could charge this fee to the person using the service. To my knowledge, he hasn’t responded.
County staff, not the tax commissioner, has informed us that the state WILL allow us to charge the fee to the person who is using a credit card, but only if they make the transaction on line. I am told that if the same individual were to come in person to the tax office to pay a tax bill with a credit card we could NOT, by law, charge them the fee. So, you would pay it.
This is how silly some regulations are and how unrealistic those who write them can be. But silly or not, we have to live with them, until we can change them.
If I were to see a proposal from the tax commissioner that addressed these issues and concerns, I would have enough information to happily make a decision.
The tax commissioner is what is called a “constitutional officer.” This means that their job is spelled out in the Georgia Constitution and that the voters elect them to the office. The other, countywide, “constitutional officers” are the sheriff, the clerk of the superior court and the probate court judge.
Since those constitutional officers don’t have any responsibility to tax you, it’s easy for them to spend your money to make other people happy.
In other places, the constitutional officers blame the commission for raising taxes and the commission blames the constitutional officers for spending money. In this game, neither one has to take any responsibility. The only one who “pays” is you, the taxpayer.
That’s how it’s been done in the past and that’s how it continues to be done in many other places. This has included using the taxpayers’ money to “buy” re-election. Think about all the scandals in Washington, D.C., and in Atlanta.
It is my hope and determination that if the beginning of the end to this practice has to start here, it will.
Peter Pfeifer
County Commission, Post 3
Peachtree City, Ga.