Hillary Tilghman Wants Your Money
If you are becoming confused, don’t feel bad. This is precisely what Tilghman wants.
Tilghman hoped to force the council to come up with this on their own, but since the only two members of council with a backbone don’t carry water for Tilghman, that was a bust. Now Tilghman is placed in the position of asking for a HUGE rate increase. If we use Bill Duvall’s figure of an average annual water and sewer bill of $962.00, the average ratepayer will see their cost rise to $1,665 in FY 2013! (see the attached table for a full explanation). Over a five year period this amounts to a 72% increase over the current rates! (Note that others writing about this issue neglect to add in the final 3% in year 5)
Is such an increase necessary? That remains open to debate. What is not debatable are two ponts:
Some rate increase will be necessary. and …
The Cause -
a complete lack of planning on the part of the Tilghman administration coupled with a seemingly insane desire to subsidize residential developers through the thoroughly discredited Tilghman / Comegys / Dunn Growth Pays for Growth “strategy”.
City Finance Director Pam Oland claims that “part of the increase had nothing to do with growth”. This is probably true. Of course she fails to discuss how much of the increase IS related to growth and why the developers are not paying that portion of the cost.
Solutions exist for, at least, portions of this problem. Unfortunately for the taxpayers (and ratepayers) of Salisbury they will not be adopted by this council. Cutting wasteful spending is not amenable to the likes of Louise Smith, Gary Comegys or Shanie Shields. In a land governed by a fascist queen and administered using the peculiar (and disreputable) laws of Bubbanomics we are lead to believe that enlarging the city’s bureaucracy somehow contributes to economic growth.
Voters do have an option available to them; but it cannot be exercised until next year.
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With every passing day, I am increasingly happy that we moved out of the city limits about 10 years ago. Water bills in the City of Salisbury will soon make those of the citizens of Fruitland look like a bargain.