Coming this Fall to a mailbox near you: A Property Tax Increase!

Coming this Fall to a mailbox near you: A Property Tax Increase!

Executive Brief:

• Fort Lauderdale will have as much as a $50 Million budget gap this fall.
• Our Mayor and Commission have done nothing to prepare for this budget gap.
• Either mass layoffs or higher taxes and fees will have to be implemented.
• You can do something to insure that you are not hit with higher taxes and fees this fall!

Just when you think it can’t get any worse with our City Commission and our City Manager bungling our swollen City’s Budget, now comes this. It appears that our City will have as much as a $50 million dollar shortfall later this year!

Last year’s budget shortfall was between $20-30 million , due to our greedy and manipulative City Manager George Gretsas keeping the budget at the same swollen amount it was the year before. Rather than reduce the budget, Gretsas kept the budget “as-is”, complete with 5%-10% City Employee pay raises for this year, longevity pay bonuses, ridiculously high management salaries and bloated bureaucracies. He used a major portion of our Budget Reserve last year to close the gap.

Our Mayor Jack Seiler (who campaigned on establishing “zero-based budgeting”), simply accepted and voted for the “out of whack” budget last year, saying there had not been enough time to make reductions. This, after he had been in office for more than eight months. What is he doing? Doesn’t Mayor Jack Seiler realize that establishing and working from a fiscally sound budget is the most important responsibility of a Mayor?  He apparently hasn’t yet learned this.

So our Mayor and Commission have essentially wasted almost a year while operating under an absurdly high budget. They could have spent the last year analyzing and cutting the millions in excess that our City is burning through each month, preparing us for the shortfall that lies ahead. They instead have decided to dither and do nothing.

Therefore, the budget gap we will have this fall will be far worse. Foreclosures are continuing un-abated, property values are continuing to decline and businesses are closing. There are no longer enough funds in our Budget Reserve to cover the pending shortfall. If our Mayor follows the same instructions he gave to Gretsas last year (“Don’t lay off any City Employees…”), then guess what?  Tax increases and higher fees to you the Fort Lauderdale resident!

How bad are things at City Hall? Take a look-

1.     Our City has had five Financial Directors in five years under Gretsas. Each Director has either quit in disgust or has been fired by Gretsas when they were unwilling to follow his financially “shady” directives.

2.     Gretsas is fighting the Commission on allowing an outside audit of certain City Departments. He apparently doesn’t want anyone outside his domain to see how bad things really are.

3.     Gretsas has also blocked our own City Auditor from examining the books of certain City Departments.

4.     Gretsas has developed a habit of waiting until the last possible minute to provide requested financial data to Commissioners until just prior to Commission meetings. This makes it difficult for Commissioners to make knowledgeable decisions on specific financial issues.

5.     It is well documented how Gretsas has placed incompetent people in charge of most of our City Departments. These “misfits” have become experts (under Gretsas), in learning how to spend other people’s money. They are in their positions NOT because of their abilities; they are there because they do Gretsas’ bidding.

6.     Currently our City Manager has the ability to write checks up to $10,000 (and in some cases $25,000), without informing or getting the approval of the City Commission. As long as the checks are under that amount, he is free to spend whatever he likes and pay whoever he likes. How many of these $10,000 to $25,000 checks has he written without the knowledge of the Commission? Who were these checks written to? No one knows, but it appears that there may be hundreds of these checks that he has written over the last 5+ years. This procedure has left the door wide open to corruption and fraud.

7.     I’ve told you about how Gretsas has increased our City’s budget 10% for every year up to last year. Most cities increase their budgets only 1-3% annually. These huge annual increases have enabled expectations to be set by our City Employees on how much their salaries should be and how big their raises will be each year.

8.     With our City Manager’s compensation of $345,000 per year (even higher than the Vice President of the United States), all other mid and upper management employees of Fort Lauderdale have higher salaries than other cities our size. The high number of Assistant City Managers and their compensation packages (exceeding a quarter of a million dollars each), are higher than what full-time Mayors of cities like Chicago and Los Angeles earn!

9.     A benchmark study done last year showed that Cities the size of Fort Lauderdale have (on average) about 1,600 city employees. Fort Lauderdale has 2,600 employees. Why do we need almost 1,000 employees more than other cities our size?

10.                        When non-emergency City employees keep getting annual raises of 5% to 10%, it causes our Police and Fire personnel to rightly ask “Why aren’t we getting the same raises? Result: our personnel costs have gotten out of control here in Fort Lauderdale.

Many had hoped that with a new Mayor and Commission last year, there would have been a new set of directives and financial controls quickly put in place, especially with the rapidly declining economy. But with Mayor Jack “don’t rock the boat” Seiler, no changes or financial reductions have been put in place and none are planned at this point. Mayor Seiler (along with “do-nothing” Commissioners DuBose and Rogers) appear to be content in guiding us straight over a financial cliff later this year when the budget gap formally presents itself. There will be few options at that point. Either wholesale layoffs of City Employees and/or raise the millage rate on property taxes and increasing other fees to fill the gap.

It’s a real shame. These are the people we elected to guide our City into a new era of progressive and open governance; people who were supposed to take on the responsibility to establish new visions and better financial controls. Instead we have people content to keep the status quo, to keep the same spending spree going as long as possible.

As Bette Davis once said: “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride”.

If you think our Mayor and Commission need to get their act together, here is a suggestion on what you can do. (It’s worked before!) Send them an email! Here are their addresses (cut & paste):

jack.seiler@fortlauderdale.gov, broberts@fortlauderdale.gov, crodstrom@fortlauderdale.gov, bdubose@fortlauderdale.gov, rrogers@fortlauderdale.gov

And here is a suggested letter to them:

To our Mayor and Commissioners:  Please take action now to reduce expenditures and prepare ourselves and our City for a significantly lower budget this fall. You must not raise property taxes or increase other fees! You have had almost a year now to make preparations for lower revenues, yet you’ve done nothing. If you come to the residents this fall with a proposal to raise taxes or fees, you will have demonstrated your incompetence as an elected official. Do the right thing and get to work now! REDUCE COSTS. DO NOT RAISE TAXES OR FEES!

And once again, Fort Lauderdale, thank you for your help!

Earl Rynerson