City Budget Misdirection

The City staff and Council use a variety of techniques to focus citizens attention on issues or comparisons that are at best irrelevant or at worst, misleading.  These are called "red herrings".

The most egregious example is the undue focus on tax rate, even though there are statutory requirements for public hearings, etc. The bottom line to the taxpayer is how much money is being extracted from their pockets.  The projected property tax bill for the "average home" is $1,019.  That is a 9.9% increase over the prior year tax bill. How many taxpayers have seen their income increase by 9.9% over the past year?  Likely not many. Let us see the trend over time in the "average home" tax bill.  Is it reasonable for the benefits received?  Each taxpayer can make their own determination.

Another way to focus on the taxpayer is to feature the increase in projected property tax revenue in aggregate over time with residential and commercial revenues separated.  These numbers have to be calculated in order to formulate the budget, so they should be readily available.

There is also undue interest focused on the tax rate for debt interest and principal reduction.  Most of the analysis tends to focus on voter approved debt, but, significant debt is incurred by the electric, water and storm water operations.  Citizens need to know explicitly the total city indebtedness and the multi-year trend of public indebtedness.  This allows people to see if debt is outpacing our ability to pay for it.  There is also an abundance of attention paid to individual capital projects without showing how the projects fit into the larger debt picture.  This causes people to focus on particular projects while ignoring the ever increasing total city debt.

Another "red herring" is the comparison of Georgetown's tax rate with other nearby cities.  This is like comparing your income with your neighbor's income.  It might be interesting, but, it is completely irrelevant to your own financial well-being.  Every city is unique with unique opportunities and problems and comparing with other nearby cities adds little or no value.

The City needs to show the citizens the long-term trends in key budget parameters and how the proposed budget compares with the past budgets over multiple years.  Year to year comparisons are necessary, but, insufficient to provide long-term guidance.  By ignoring/omitting longer term trends in key budget parameters, the citizen/taxpayer is not given the necessary context in which to assess current budget proposals.