Please use these opportunities to provide feedback to your elected officials on the FY25 budget. ACC commissioners will vote on the FY25 budget on Wednesday, June 5th, after a 6pm public hearing at the Clark County School District Vernon Payne Meeting, 595 Prince Ave. Approval of the FY25 budget is item 43 on the commission's agenda. CCSD will hold a second budget hearing on June 4th, a final hearing on June 12th, and a vote on June 13th.
Many Athenians sit at their kitchen tables wondering how to pay their bills and feed their families as inflation continues. But not at City Hall or the Prince Avenue Taj Mahal. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, while people struggle, politicians continue to spend our tax money like drunken sailors…in fact, they're giving sailors a bad name!
With cumulative inflation reaching 21.15% since 2020, many are literally saving pennies and holding off on basic necessities. Many Athenians are struggling to make ends meet before payday and pay rent that increased last year, which could rise even further if elected officials increase taxes. Another sign of stress: 78% of Americans consider fast food meals a luxury. Think about it.
While people are forced to make tough choices about what they have to give up, City Hall and Taj are living in their own world, convinced that all their dreams are possible. They are overjoyed at the continued growth of their tax summaries, believing that their tax summaries are their piggy bank. After all, “it's just someone else's money”. For the FY2020-FY2525 budget period, ACC's cumulative tax summaries growth was 68%. That's a pretty big piggy bank!
At the dinner table, we have to be frugal and think about how to get the best value for less money, whereas they measure value by the amount spent, not the outcome, and spend more to get less.
That’s why you need to show up to the next City Hall Budget Hearing and the next CCSD Budget Hearing and make your voice heard by those in power.
City Hall Taxation and Expenditures
City Hall's FY25 expenditures (operating and capital expenditures) will increase from $301 million to $350 million. Flagpole reported that Commissioners Houle, Fisher and Hamby agreed to make changes to the budget but not cuts. This is another example of the secretive nature of their operations, as City Hall has not opened this alternative budget proposal up to public review.
Additionally, City Hall has no forum for citizens to ask questions about the budget and get answers. I was recently forced to file an open records request to uncover the Mayor's comments on the budget, but was told it would cost $561.94.
Georgia's Taxpayer Right to Know Act requires that local governments hold three public hearings before voting on a tax increase. But the ACC set the third hearing for the same night as the budget and property tax increase votes. Their vote, item 43 on a 45-item agenda, sends a message to citizens asking them to keep their noses in the sand. Both tactics show an extraordinary level of disrespect and arrogance towards citizens.
Our commissioners are happy to cooperate with these tactics because they don't want to answer public questions from the public. In other words, they are manipulating the budget process to avoid public accountability. It's always interesting how they act like one big fish at the dinner table about their family or company finances, but when it comes to other people's money, they act like drunk sailors.
City Hall's 458-page budget tells the story of an out-of-control and ever-expanding central office bureaucracy as city managers add non-public safety, non-direct service delivery staff to build the bureaucracy, driving up the cost of government. The story also tells of delays to new initiatives and infrastructure that create a wave of future funding requirements while prioritizing social engineering above all else. There is no mention in the story of achieving government efficiency, more effective use of resources, and increased productivity for money.
For example, City Hall’s intention to set aside $5 million for “affordable housing” is just the first step in a campaign to ask voters to raise the sales tax from 8% to 9% to make housing dreams a reality, thus making Athens join a small number of taxing jurisdictions in Georgia with a 9% sales tax rate, more on this later.
City Hall says the strategic plan drives the budget, but reading this “plan” is like trying to make sense of a social engineering dictionary of buzzwords generated by a random word processor. The January 2024 plan identified 11 priorities, but not one of those priorities included core/mission infrastructure. In the FY25 budget, the words “manmade and natural infrastructure” appear at the end of six strategic word salad goals. This word salad doesn't even recognize core infrastructure needs like roads, water/sewer, impacts of aging residential septic systems, storm water, intersections, sidewalks/signals, etc.
The mayor believes he can create a new reality from this string of words to justify prioritizing progressive policies. When you take this string of words and try to understand it concretely and think about what it means, you question the sanity of the process, but sanity is not needed when other people's money is involved.
As an aside, I have reviewed City Hall's budget and identified $15 million that can be cut without impacting our core mission and infrastructure. Based on an objective analysis, there is potential for further cuts. These cuts would be enough to offset important public safety needs that the Mayor has not funded, right-size government, address some infrastructure needs, and provide some relief to taxpayers. This information was provided to multiple Commissioners, but no one responded.
How much is enough at the Taj?
The Taj's budget is also terrible, and deserves more attention than I can write about in the space I have today: The Taj budget increases general fund spending by 9.9 percent to $240 million, which includes a $50 million operating reserve and a $34 million capital projects reserve, but it doesn't provide any benefits to taxpayers.
CCSD is a school with a highly problematic record on academic improvement, due in part to a combination of declining student enrollment and rising per capita spending: Since its peak in 2018, enrollment has fallen by about 1,400 students, while per capita spending has increased from about $11,000 to about $19,000.
Georgia Department of Education (GaDOE) 2022-23 Georgia Milestones exam scores are not showing good results. Students are not making enough progress to make up for academic losses caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Recall that CCSD committed to remote learning while surrounding counties did not close schools. Additionally, student scores were more than 10 points below the statewide average on most exams, with just over 50% of students in grades 3-8 reading at or above grade level.
Taj's plan is full of wordplay. Statements like “Connected Culture, Optimized Talent, Thriving Students” and “We create an educational journey for every student to realize their potential” leave too much to the imagination. One would expect an educational institution to be able to communicate in clear, understandable and concrete terms, not muddled language. It seems as though the strategic plan has been shaped to suit some ideological agenda, rather than practical and actionable to achieve better results.
The Taj budget, like City Hall's, continues to address staffing increases, and both budgets incorporate staff positions that were funded on schedule using pandemic response funds from the American Rescue Plan Act into the Taj's operating budget.
Taj is also unwilling to hold public participation or questions about the budget. Taj must also follow the Georgia Taxpayer Right to Know Act, yet he displayed his arrogance by voting to tentatively approve the budget on May 9th before holding three budget sessions in June. What message does this send to taxpayers?
No one is advocating for defunding CCSD schools the way local progressives are advocating for defunding the police. But citizens have legitimate concerns about CCSD spending and the quality of the outcomes it produces. Some may argue that we always need to put more money into schools. But this argument boils down to the fact that public education spending has reached record highs, yet educational outcomes have not sustainably improved. It is fair to ask: how much is enough?
summary
Politicians love to say we didn't raise your property taxes because “we” didn't vote to raise the tax rate, then have amnesia when they forget they got the tax increase as a benefit when they could have voted to lower taxes to bail out taxpayers when taxes went up by 68%.
These remind me of a famous line from my favorite comedian, Flip Wilson, that has now become part of our culture. One of his characters always had the excuse, “The devil made me do it.”
The actions of our elected officials have shown no evidence of a commitment to making government cheaper, more efficient, and more effective — or, for that matter, transparency in government and meaningful public engagement.
They are interested in promoting a string of words with meaningless goals and throwing money at special interests. It's like throwing money at the wall to see what sticks. In their mind, approving a budget to spend money is a success, but “don't expect to be held accountable for the results.”
They really are behaving like drunk sailors.
