Cobb County Taxes

Perfectly well said, editorial from the Marietta Daily Journal:

EDITORIAL: Where have all the conservatives gone? By Larry Savage

True colors will show with Wednesday’s millage rate vote
There are more than a few who share the blame for this reckless indulgence, but the daddy rabbit is Chairman Mike Boyce, a man who charmed the public into thinking he opposed tax hikes on the campaign trail only to reveal his true colors once elected.

Speaking to the East Cobb Civic Association in 2012, for instance, Boyce emphasized he was a Republican, the party of “fiscal responsibility,” as he blasted then-Chairman Tim Lee for raising taxes in 2011.

“What we did last year, what the chairman led last year, is not a Republican government,” Boyce said. “We raised taxes. Nothing he says after that is going to eliminate the fact that we raised taxes as Republicans. We can’t sit here as Republicans and criticize President Obama’s administration for raising taxes and cutting benefits and do the same thing here in Cobb County and think that we’re different. We’re not. It’s time to hold people accountable. If you voted for a tax raise last year, you need to be held accountable. That’s why I’m in this race.” So much for campaign rhetoric.

Yet before Boyce’s political future receives an auto-da-fe, he deserves credit for holding seven town halls plus three required budget hearings where he faced an often angered constituency. It’s not unheard of for some officials to keep their budget hidden, springing it on an unsuspecting public before there’s time to mount a challenge. Not the case with Chairman Boyce, who has made clear his intentions for close to a year.

And while Boyce is the tip of the spear on this latest assault on your bank account, he can’t do it without two other commission votes. He’s always had one: Democrat Lisa Cupid, who has never hidden her agenda to raise taxes, it being a plank of the Democratic Party to transfer wealth from those with means to those without. Exhibit A is her trip to Florida, where she and Boyce’s special assistant, Michael Murphy, toured a homeless camp near Tampa. Murphy spilled the beans about that endeavor to the MDJ last week, sharing how he had been scouting sites in Cobb to build a new homeless shelter. Where in the budget has this money been squirreled away?

But as we said, it’s no great shock that the sole Democrat on the commission wants to help Boyce raise taxes. What is eyebrow-raising are the signals Republican Commissioners JoAnn Birrell and Bob Weatherford gave during Tuesday’s budget meeting.

Weatherford is in a race for his political life in Tuesday’s GOP runoff against Keli Gambrill. (Note how Boyce conveniently arranged for the tax vote to take place the day after the runoff, letting Weatherford off the hook from voting until the runoff is safely over.) Even so, at Tuesday’s meeting, Weatherford said he “fully” believes a tax hike of between 1.1 and 1.7 “is where we ought to be.”

And then there’s Birrell, who informed the audience with complete sincerity the tally of emails and phone calls she was receiving for and against the tax hike was close, as if abandoning one’s principles over a half a dozen more phone calls was somehow taking the moral high ground.

That wasn’t the only “bless her heart” comment of the evening. “No matter what we do or what we cut or close or do away with, we’re not going to come up with the $30 million shortfall unless we pretty much close down the county government, and we can’t do that,” she said.

Let’s chew on that wonder for a moment. Despite the $966.1 million budget Boyce wants the commission to adopt (following a 9.1 percent jump in the county’s gross tax digest over last year), Birrell believes the commission would have to “pretty much close down the county government” because it couldn’t find $30 million in cuts?

And we won’t even get into the $750 million Cobb voters approved in 2014, renewing once again the endless 1 percent special purpose local option sales tax cycle for the government to spend, spend, spend.

Perhaps if Birrell and the rest of the commission hadn’t saddled the county’s budget with $10.4 million in annual raises to county staff, along with monthly agenda books chock full of questionable expenses, they wouldn’t be in financial straits.

Of course, one would have no inkling of Cobb’s largesse by listening to the 12-minute oration Cupid gave on Tuesday in which she, channeling Dolores Umbridge in all but the pink outfit and purring kittens, expressed how “saddened, disheartened and disappointed” she was in Cobb residents who didn’t value things they believed served little purpose.
You’d have thought the county bureaucrats had just been awarded Purple Hearts the way she spoke of them doing the kind of jobs they’re perfectly well compensated to do.

“So many of us can’t see past our noses, to see where Cobb County is going to be. Cobb County is changing, Cobb County has changed,” Cupid said, reaching for the highest horse she could find. “This is not the same old sleepy town that some people remember of Cobb County. We are becoming an urbanized county every day.”

But who are we kidding? Commissioners have made up their minds. Boyce and his Minister of Propaganda, Ross Cavitt, have done a masterful, Machiavellian sales job in frightening the citizenry by threatening libraries, parks and senior centers if they don’t get the tax hike they so desperately want.

The only commissioner who can be relied upon to put this swollen government on a diet is Bob Ott, who said he cannot support Boyce’s budget because “I don’t believe it looks for the efficiencies or cuts before calling for a tax increase.”
Ott has called for trimming animal control’s budget, re-evaluating the Cobb Safety Village, moving toward a regional library concept and reviewing the county’s vehicle inventory as cost cutting measures.

And lest you believe Cobb commissioners are finished reaching their thirsty hands into your pocketbook, wait until Boyce’s tax hike passes. As one politico told the MDJ this week, the campaign to raise the sales tax for mass transit is simply waiting for Boyce’s tax to pass before it turns on the ignition. Combined with the water rates commissioners just hiked on residents this month and it’s death by a thousand tax hikes. – Larry Savage.

The Cobb Board of Commissioners, which used to be known as a responsible body, is expected to raise taxes on Wednesday.

County employees, Commissioner Cupid lectured, her finger wagging at the crowd, her feet planted firmly on a soap box, “were exhausting themselves to provide the same level of services” and “being asked to turn straw into gold. … But it’s not enough.”

Cobb is indeed changing, Commissioner, and it’s not for the better when it ranks No. 1 among Georgia’s counties for the number of seized opioids submitted by law enforcement to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for testing.

Source: Editorial in Marietta Daily Journal.

Comments

Cobb is the “Poster Child” for county government abuse. The problem is tribal.  Cobb has the “free spending” tribe that wants their county government to spend like crazy and they keep reelecting free spenders.  The other group is the “regular folks” tribe that includes citizens who soon will not be able to afford to live in Cobb County.

Larry Savage is a smart, honest populist and should have been elected to the Cobb Commission long ago. He would have required ballot votes for big spending and big borrowing.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader