| Coral Springs
voters are not suckers. Overwhelmingly they voted
against what would have been a more than 215 % increase to
Coral Springs city commissioner's salaries. With a 45% turnout in
the Nov
7th election the resolution was defeated 15,386 to 10,815.
This has to be a wakeup call to our city commissioners
who think that just because very few people turn out to
commission meetings doesn't mean that the voting population
isn't paying attention. If only they were less hoggish
about the amount of an increase, then maybe they would have received
something,. However large salaries for our commissioners are
not needed since our city does not have a Strong
Mayor type of government. Instead we have a very well paid city manager to run the affairs of
our city. He does this this under the control of an
elected part time city commission who's members should have other
jobs outside of their elected ones to pay the majority of
their wages.
The system has worked so far, with our city being the
most financially sound municipality in the United States.
There was no reason to change it and certainly no reason to
have given the huge increases that the city commissioners
were asking . Now if any city commissioner feels that they
are not getting paid enough they can either resign or
not run again in the next election. No one should be
in it for the money when running for office in our city.
Defeated as well were two large spending measures that
the Broward County commission had asked the public for.
One of them was to float a 450 million dollar bond to repair
the court houses. The other was the Penny tax
which would have increase the sales tax in the county by 1%,
from 6% to 7%. to add more money to the already incompetent
county wide transportation system. They called it the
Penny Tax since 1% of a dollar is a penny. They failed to realize that taxpayers know mathematics and
very few spend only a dollar. They knew quite well that if
they called it what it really was, a 16.7% increase in
the sales tax rate, they would have a hard time selling it
to the public.
In both cases few details were given to the public about
how our elected officials would spend the money.
With revenues from
property taxes at an all time high, fiscal responsibility
was more on the minds of the taxpayers than providing the
county with more money to spend, irresponsibly.
In an election where the Democrats have won in what I
would call a landslide, the defeat of a bond, the penny tax
and the 215% increase to the city commissioner's wages is
very "Republican" of us, don't you think?
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