Main Street Journal: Suggestions for Things to Cut Before Raising Property Taxes

The Main Street Journal Website

(Joe Saino is a regular contributor to the Main Street Journal. He also blogs at The Memphis Watchdog.)

Suggestions for Things to Cut Before Raising Property Taxes
By: Joe Saino

We are living in a bizarre time when the City Council even talks about raising property taxes to pay for our inflated, poorly performing, overstaffed school system and our overstaffed City administration. Need something to cut? Here are just a few suggestions.

· In the last ten years, the Memphis School System student population has gone from 109137 to 103000 (down 5.6%) while the number of employees has gone from 10693 to 16500 (up 54%).

· The budget has gone from $550 million to $931 million (up 69%).

· The CPI (consumer price index) has gone up 31%.

· Force the MCS system to cut their inflated budget.

· A 10% personnel cut in the City of Memphis. The cuts should be actual jobs, not phony ghost jobs. The actual funded staffing level for 2007 was 5534. The adopted 2009 funded staffing level was 6309, an increase of 14%. A 10% cut is not unreasonable. It should be across the board from the top to the bottom.

· We need a fundamental change in our City and County personnel policy to bring it more in line with the “for profit” world where all the tax money originates. We now have at the top end of years in service (15 years or more) 5 weeks vacation, 6 weeks of sick days, 11 holidays, 4 bonus days and three days death in family leave. This amounts to over ¼ of the year. Private for profit companies do not have anywhere near this level of days off.

· Change our pension system for future employees to a 401k system like the private sector.

· Kill the Riverfront Development Corporation and its Beale Street Landing project which just went up $8.9 million in cost. This will save millions on a project that adds nothing of value to downtown and is a burden on the taxpayers.

This is not the time to add property taxes on the backs of home owners which is killing this City and County.

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