Inside Mesa

So what did we go through the exercise of dividing a citizenry over the need for a property tax? In some ways I come to this Blog with my hat in my hand, the Mesa City Council has tentatively adopted a new budget and this is not a budget that looks like a city in crisis. It is a bloated budget of record proportions. Many of the things that we were told would suffer seem to have found funding. My biggest fear and the scare tactic that worked so well on me was the threat that the fire and police departments would be decimated if the property tax didn’t pass. Well, I guess that I was wrong. It appears that the new budget includes pay raise and pension increases for our officers to the tune of $7.6 million. Members of the city council quipped that they would like future budgets to be easier for residents to comprehend. Here is a message for the City Council, if you want to put together a budget that we can understand then just follow the same rule that we are faced with every day, don’t spend more than you take in, and don’t ask for an increase in your allowance if you haven’t done anything to earn it. Many of the cuts are going to be painful, but not life threatening. Government is not the answer for everything. Some of the things being cut like holiday lighting, special events and funding for art groups can be picked up by private non-governmental interests. If the citizens of Mesa don’t want to adopt a property tax and they want some of these programs to continue then they will step up and take care of it through the generosity of charitable giving. This city is chugging along, sure we are going to be short a few things but isn’t that how life works, when you make less money at home you cut some of the frills out of your life until you can afford to do them again. Let’s focus now on holding our Council Members accountable for spending our money, after all, they just adopted a budget that include almost a billion dollars of it.