I’ve told you all about my financial policy throughout the campaign: I believe in responsible and conservative spending. As your Mayor, I will equal or improve on my last terms in office, when I balanced every one of my budgets and left office with cash in the bank. I haven’t forgotten these lessons from my first go-around as Mayor. This year, as a Fiscal Court Magistrate, I authored a resolution that lowered personal property taxes for every Scott County businesses in 2014. It passed unanimously through the Fiscal Court. My opponent, however, does not subscribe to this theory. Mr. Varney has proposed tax raises every single year he’s been in office. They include: • A 50% increase to the payroll tax, the largest proposed tax increase in Georgetown’s history • A 5% increase in your natural gas rate for 2014 • A tax on your second trash container, or “Trash Tax”, and • The highest liquor tax rate in Kentucky. Three years ago, he proposed two budgets to the city council. The first contained many suffocating tax raises like the ones listed above. The second had deep, bloody cuts to essential city services with no tax raises. Mr. Varney himself referred to this budget as the “bone marrow” budget, because that’s what we’d have to get by on to survive. The city council, in a display of tough leadership, compromised on their own to avoid disaster. After all that, we somehow woke up this morning with twice as much debt as we do money in the bank. In contrast, the Fiscal Court, which I have been a part of for 16 years, has zero debt and millions in reserves. Over the next four years, we’re going to have to do some creative managing of our city’s money to withstand the $2.5 million lost to the Toyota incentive package. It will be a challenge, but it’s doable. Can you really trust Mr. Varney’s record to balance a budget without committing you, your neighbors, and our local business owners, to crushing tax raises? Remember: he wants to raise your taxes. I lowered them. We can do better.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 16:15:50 +0000
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