Lake Worth's Field of Dreams

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This morning's headline is "Maximum tax hike:  $98 million."  The PBPost was talking about Palm Beach County property owners paying that much more in property taxes as well as special assessments next year, up 3.5%. Click on their Interactive Map to see how your property compares with your neighbors.

And when considering Lake Worth, the 2nd poorest city in Palm Beach County (we are reminded from the dais on how poor we are), any sort of a tax hike is painful. And thanks to the economic meltdown from which we have never recovered, 87% of the properties in Lake Worth are worth under $100,000, many paying no taxes. My property has gone down again this year which was a shocking discovery this week.

It's getting like the federal government around here. The only difference is, Lake Worth can't print money and we can't borrow from China. What we can do, however, is obligate the residents to more debt with the more affluent paying much, much more.  Perhaps an assessment is off the table but now the city commission with the mayor leading the way wants to commit Lake Worth taxpayers to anywhere from $48 million to $81 million in MORE debt for roads and a piece of land on Boutwell Road known as the Park of Commerce, the commission's Field of Dreams. They keep us poor through debt and then blame all the poor people for all the economic problems here.

We have plenty of debt on the books that we are paying on or can't fund right now--
$55,955,000 on the utility upgrade
$87 million in unfunded pension liability--that's,
$143 MILLION we owe right now and a heck of a lot for a city that is generating less than $6 million a year in ad-valorem. And we can't forget that public safety takes 2/3rds of our operating revenue.

The City Commission's direction and philosophy has been a commitment to electric rate parity with FPL and researching the Lake Worth Electric Utility's value for a possible sale. They have voted on the reduction of the General fund dependency on Utility contributions and will wean us off within a five year plan. The only way they can do this is to hope that every taxpayer wants to pay for a General Obligation Bond for 30 years of payments and debt for road infrastructure and the Park of Commerce so that we can get those potholes repaired and spur development. In that way the commission gets its cake and eats it too--off electrical utility funding dependency but then have the money to repair our roads and attract developers. If they can't get the money on one end (the electric utility), they will get it on another end.

They plan on re-doing our roads and infrastructure along with a dream of developing the Park of Commerce for businesses that may or may not want to locate there as well as reducing the dependency on the electric utility. To make up for our general fund shortfall of nearly $10 million a year, they will attempt to commit us to maybe $81 million in more bond debt over 30 years. Not once has the commission touched on controlling the "un-controllable" costs such as pensions. PBSO's charges are going up and not once have I heard mention of this.The final draft of the budget is online--Click here

The commission and city staff will be bringing its presentation and propaganda to the neighborhood associations to "educate" the voters. If the commission passes its field of dreams idea to obligate the taxpayers to a general obligation bond to fix the potholes and entice development, it will go to the voters to decide.