By Mike Lednovich
At a city commission workshop Wednesday, Interim City Manager Charlie George outlined numerous key city improvement projects that would need to be cut in order to lower taxes in the 2023-24 budget under a rollback millage rate.
The “rollback property tax rate” is the tax rate that would be required to generate the same amount of tax revenue for the city as the previous year, taking into account changes in property values and assessment rates.
George said the proposed 2023-24 budget would require cutting $2.5 million out of the budget to make the rollback rate.
“With operating expenses increasing, reduction in costs come from the capital improvements projects. This is the place we could cut the most to get to the rollback rate,” George told commissioners. “The most important things are the things that are not in the 2023-24 budget that we are proposing.”
Projects eliminated would include:
- No new significant improvements to the historic downtown.
- No new sidewalks, streetscape or parking improvements.
- No new beach access walkways.
- Reduced street resurfacing, especially in the downtown district (Front, Third and Ash streets)
- Minimum work on City Hall.
- Minimum work on the lighthouse.
- Small improvements only to the Atlantic Recreation Center.
- Deferring seven maintenance equipment items to next year.
- Minimum work on the Peck Center.
George said, “This is the best way we know to get to the rollback rate.”
He said the city would gain $500,000 from that $2.5 million reduction under the “adjusted rollback rate.” The adjusted rollback rate is calculated by dividing the total amount of property tax revenue collected in the previous year by the total assessed value of all taxable properties in the city.
“This budget is pretend and extend,” said Commissioner Chip Ross. “We are pretending that we have a number of capital needs that we need to fulfill that we’re simply ignoring. We’re telling taxpayers we’re going to give them all these benefits but we’re not.”
Ross said there were numerous projects promised to the taxpayers that are ignored in this budget, such as downtown/City Hall $3 million, flood wall $14 million, lights, sidewalks and landscaping.
Also missing from the budget are improvements to the downtown.
“The downtown and the beaches are the economic driver of this community and we are not funding the downtown,” Ross said. “The curbs are breaking apart, the brick work is breaking apart and the lights can’t be replaced and all of that is about $3 million to replace.”
Ross also cited replacement of beach walkovers that were removed in 2019.
“We are pretending that these needs don’t exist,” Ross said. “We have been promising for years to give them the beach walkovers (that we took out). The answer is we’re not going to put them back. We either have to say we’re not going to do this and we’re going to cut taxes. If you want to not tax people you have to tell them what you’re not going to do.”
George said several beach walkovers already budgeted for this year – at access 16 and 40 – would be rolled over into 2023-2024 budget because they were delayed by the turtle nesting season.
Mayor Bradley Bean took a different position.
“There’s many ways you can look at a situation. You can make a list of what a budget doesn’t fund. I choose to look at what this budget does fund. There’s so many great things this budget does fund without raising taxes,” Bean said.
Bean didn’t name those specific “great things” included in the 2023-24 proposed budget. He cited the beach walkover projects, but those were the walkovers being carried over from the 2022-24 budget into next year.
How many employees does our city of less than 14,000 have?
Pollyanna with rose colored glasses. Over the past 20+ years the common practice of this City has been to defer the needed maintenance and repairs to most all city assets- be it a sidewalk, street light, beach access, public bathrooms, the Peck Center, the Rec Center, MLK, Brett’s, City Hall and so much more. Maintenance has been deferred until it gets ratcheted up to the ‘we can’t ignore it anymore’ level everywhere except for maybe city vehicles which has a strict replacement policy.
For every dollar “saved” by deferring maintenance, there comes a five to ten dollar increase in future capital renewal costs. Then there are additional indirect costs that may have even larger impacts. Over the life of City assets, those additional costs usually total more than 20-30 times what would have been spent on the maintenance in the first case.
Numbers talk. You can’t rob Peter to pay Paul- or you can- and that’s when the city shifts to reactive maintenance and we end up with city assets that need emergency service or total replacement.
IMHO, we desperately need a Commission that supports a fully funded capital improvement plan. Backlogs of deferred maintenance and ideological in-fighting is sadly what will take our City down.
And again … can we cite the report/study that supports the numerical “data” cited in your second paragraph as I asked under another similar article? No, I don’t think so. This information is thrown out like it is some kind of factual given … but in reality it is just a throw away opinion. It is also called “disinformation”. Perhaps there are more costs over time by not performing maintenance in some areas … but this “5 to 10 dollar increase” for every dollar not spent … and “20-30 times” is just a lot of unsupported baloney. And not the kind you can eat. Stick to facts without exaggerating the impact. Yes, “numbers talk”. So let’s make them accurate or supportable numbers or leave them out of your diatribe.