Government Entitlements

While seemingly separate events and issues, the county's ongoing jostling with the looming budget and a commissioner's excursion with a Mosquito Control truck are, upon closer look, threads from the same cloth.

That would be the fabric of entitlement fed by a vision that extends only as far as the next re-election cycle.

Commissioners can expound and pontificate and provide all the presentations and PowerPoints they desire, but little empathy is likely to be coming from taxpayers who have subsidized the spending binges of this decade.

The county is facing tough obstacles, no question, as the folks in Tallahassee try to address a taxpayer uprising and shrinking state economy by doing what the folks in Tallahassee do so well: pass the buck.

Though the extent of the actual relief is dubious when state lawmakers provide loopholes such as a super-majority vote - four of five commissioners - that could generate a 10 percent increase in property tax collections and another that allows, provided there is voter approval, to, in Gulf County's case, more than double the millage rate.

The only saving grace on that latter discipline-avoidance mechanism is there seems no way county voters allow commissioners further pocket-dipping.

What voters would have surely liked to have seen instead of the binging of the past six or seven years would have been a Board of County Commissioners with more of a long-range plan, more of a horizon on how to spend the money in times of plenty.

When the real estate market was going great guns and the county was realizing double-digit increases in property tax increases - that would have been the time to think about what might happen if the goose stopped laying golden eggs for a time.

Commissioners were reaping so much additional money, from $6 million in 2000 to over $13 million in 2005, over the first five years of this decade that would have made a fine time to allocate for things such as rainy-day funds, infrastructure improvements and setting aside the money required - suddenly a battle cry - for unfunded state mandates.

Instead of padding a workforce/patronage system - take your pick - by roughly 150 percent, the flush times would have been the opportunity to pour the foundation for the future by, a new concept understandably, actually thinking about the future.

Now that the checks have come due, some commissioners aren't even entertaining the idea of making substantive cutbacks to property tax collections, even while forcing them on to constitutional officers, a few of which are still operating on roughly the same manpower as 10 years ago.

And if the notion that somehow diluting the impact to county property owners by approving an addition to the sales tax - that neither sunsets nor specifies what the new dollars would be earmarked for - is supposed to be soothing to property owners, that is simply a demonstration of the disconnect between commissioners and the real worlds of their constituents.

The public has seen enough of spendthrift ways the past six or seven years to dissuade taxpayers from throwing good money after bad.

And for the one commissioner, according to the Property Appraiser's website, who does not feel property owners' pain, paying no property taxes, to champion the sales tax concept is the height of irony - or maybe hubris?

This constitutes long-term vision? One gained from experience, which, in the case of two commissioners, spans two decades?

Not, apparently, when one day, should a commissioner get his back up, he essentially commandeers a Mosquito Control truck during the day and sprays in the vicinity of beekeepers, some of whom have had a long-running issue with the county about spraying.

In fact, this same commissioner spent meeting time several years ago raking over the coals the head of Mosquito Control for doing pretty much the exact same thing, other than the spraying in question then was at night and care was taken to avoid any apiaries.

But when you are one of the five with keys to the fiefdoms and this is part of your fiefdom, you do what you want, when you want, and the consequences be darned.

It was hard to tell last week if the commissioner in question was apologizing for his actions or for getting caught.

It is still unclear if, under state regulations, he even has anything to apologize for, so unusual are the circumstances.

And there sure was no indication in his apology that he gave one whit about the mosquito situation in the rest of the county, just his district.

Sure, he violated the county's own rules, one's he pushed for a couple of years ago, but this is not the first time, and surely seems unlikely to be the last, that a commissioner acted as if bound by rules solely their own.

That is how the county ends up with 24 parks but no shelter that will be opened during a major hurricane because the county won't be able to sustain, fiscally, the insurance exposure.

That is how the county operates without a work order policy, how the workforce has far, far out-paced services and a leaky courthouse can go unfixed for five or six years.

Entitlement - some county commissioners wear it like a new suit.

And last week provided clear examples of where, exactly, that has gotten the county.