Inside Mesa

The older I get the more I have learned about life and the more I have learned how to say that I am sorry and I may have been wrong. Information is key in the decision making process and too much information is never a bad thing. Here in Mesa we have just gone through a rough patch where residents were pitted one against the other as the city fought over an ever inflating budget, a proposed property tax and what the city council has portrayed as dwindling revenue in the face of massive expenditures. The city council has claimed that they have cut every conceivable expense from the budget and the only answer to rising costs was the need to implement a property tax. This is where I have to step in and state that I may have been wrong. I supported the property tax, armed with what I thought were facts I wandered out into the world and attempted to sway voters into voting "Yes", that this city was in desperate need of increasing revenue to shore up some of the essential services that were threatened. It has come to my attention that one area the city council didn’t cut was one of their precious little perks, car allowances for the political elite. To the tune of over $200,000 a year they have kept that little benefit while wailing in public about the cutbacks that will have to be made in services and staff. What else have they failed to cut? How many of you get a car allowance for your job? Tough times require a sacrifice for all, with gas prices at an all time high and with no end in sight to the pain at the pump we are all experiencing why are the politically elite among us getting a break while we have to budget in our lives to compensate? Which essential services and staff members could have been saved if only those who were connected stepped up and sacrificed what amounts to a bonus for them? The lesson I have learned here is that politicians today are like "Chicken Little" from the children’s book, they run around screaming about the sky falling. I have said it before and I will say it again, government at any level is not a money making body, they are a money taking entity and it is up top all of us to make sure they don’t take it all.