With most of the major taxing entities looking to exceed the revenue-neutral rate this year, there are a number of public hearings coming up to let the community understand the reasoning behind the increase and voice any concerns.

On one hand, everyone would prefer to pay less in taxes and keep more of their hard-earned money in their own pocket. You’ll see some people take the position that all taxes should be opposed, regardless of what they are being spent on.  On the other hand, the taxing entities provide valuable functions for the community. If all of those functions were cut, you’d probably find it hard to participate in the economic value creation in Bourbon County—let alone get paid for it. But even while recognizing that there is value in what the taxing entities provide, it is easy to try to “save money” in ways that end up costing far more than what is saved.

For example, imagine a school building with a small leak in the roof that has had its local tax revenue cut so much that teachers are being laid off and class sizes are doubling. What is going to happen to the leak in the roof? Well, it likely is going to get ignored and dealt with by using buckets to catch the water. After years of “saving money” by ignoring the leak, taxpayers will eventually have to pay a lot more to fix a big problem that could have been avoided by paying a little money to fix a small problem.

The same principle applies to roads. There are points in the lifecycle of a road where relatively inexpensive maintenance today will prevent extensive expensive repair work in the future. Apply the same idea to other buildings, equipment, etc.

In the ideal world, the taxing entities would budget in a way that maximizes the functions that are valuable to people and attractive to incoming business, minimizes the spending that isn’t valuable to citizens, and sets aside money necessary for optimal maintenance. As great as this sounds in theory, in practice it can be very hard for the county, school system, college, etc., to set aside money to maintain things that could be spent in ways people will notice today.  This is why we end up using bonds to do things like remodel the high school, fix holes in the wall, replace carpet, put in new HVAC, and fix the stage. It can be easier to get people to vote to take on an obligation to repay a loan than it is to budget setting aside money to maintain what you have.

The biggest reason for this is that when the community votes on a bond issue, that money can’t be used for anything else. This highlights the key problem with increasing general budgets for taxing entities—how the money actually gets spent as boards change and leaders come in with different agendas, pet projects, areas of expertise, financial knowledge, etc.

The challenge with this approach is that it is easy for general spending to grow in areas that are administrative overhead, pet projects, trendy technology, or other things people are excited about, at the expense of doing mundane but valuable things like fixing a leaky roof at a school, doing preventative maintenance on the courthouse building, or even long-term employee retention.

So how can a citizen advocate for fiscal responsibility and lower taxes without undercutting investments in ways that will be more expensive in the future?

There is no perfect answer to that question, but what you can do is to look at the track record of the board of each taxing entity over the last 12 months. If they look like they have been making wise decisions with your money and they say that it would be more efficient to spend a bit more money next year than to stay revenue neutral, then you should definitely hear them out. On the other hand, if they have a bad track record for how they spent your money and their time, you can probably expect a larger budget to make problems worse, not better.

When it comes to the county, I’m personally watching to see if they move forward with creating a planning committee that they can turn into a zoning committee. If they do that, I will be opposed to any increase by the county beyond a revenue-neutral position from last year.

Here is my logic. Last year the county exceeded the revenue-neutral rate by 5.37%. The year before that, they exceeded it by 5.56%. Together, these are not small increases, so it isn’t like we are starting from a position where there hasn’t been an increase for a number of years.

Where we stand today, there has been a lot of time spent by the county commissioners on zoning. Whether you are for or against zoning, it will ultimately cost the county a significant amount of money if implemented. Even if you think that is a good thing, efforts on zoning are taking away from efforts that could be spent elsewhere on higher immediate priorities and creating a track record of success.

Where else could all those efforts have been spent? Well, for one, they could have gone into making sure that notices of lawsuits against the county were given to the county lawyer so they would show up and not have a default judgment made against the county for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those efforts could have been spent on showing up for the board meetings of the juvenile detention center that the county owns and that one of the commissions is a member on the board to understand the pricing BEFORE voting to throw away investment the county had previously made in the center.

If the county commissioners decide that now is the time to move forward with passing the planning committee resolution, then there will be one more thing dividing their focus, and we should expect more things to fall through the cracks at even greater expense. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but if the commissioners move forward with the planning committee before establishing a good track record with other issues, I would oppose any increase in the county budget beyond the revenue-neutral rate.

If, on the other hand, the commissioners narrow their focus to managing the current pressing needs, then there may be a case to be made for increasing the budget if it is going to be invested in things that will cost us more to deal with later.

Mark Shead

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