Reasons to VOTE NO on the $800-million Lake County sales tax renewal referendum on the Nov. 3, 2015 ballot – read both sides / pages

By Vance Jochim, FiscalRangers.com August 22, 2015

This is the third 15-year renewal of this penny sales tax. It will generate over $800-mllion in tax collections over 15 years. The County, the School District, and a group of the 14 cities each receive 1/3. That 1/3 is about $11-12 million per year for each group.

You can find the official Lake County website supporting the tax here, including the ordinance. Notice there are no costs listed by all the proposed projects. There are no specified percentages allocated to any specific type of project like roads vs huge spending on parks.

Why Lake County voters should vote NO on the $800-million sales tax renewal:

  1. NO bonds should be issued: The agencies should pay as they receive funds, not run up debt. There will be a feeding frenzy of selling bonds, which run up debt and cost hundreds ofmillions of dollars in interest charges. The County, the School District, and the Cities should pay “as you go” and not sell costly bonds. In the last 15 year period, officials SOLD over $600-million in bonds to pay for fast construction of expensive buildings, then ran out of money during the downturn, but still had to pay millions in interest each year.In the last 15 years, the Schools alone paid over $100-million in bond interest instead of “paying as you go”.
  1. No Restrictions on Spending are defined: The wording includes spending for “quality of life” projects which is extremely vague and means the big spenders on the County Board, JimmyConners, Welton Cadwell and Sean Parks will blow the money on unexpected projects proposed by construction firms and department managers. The $10-million, always vacant and unused Emergency Operations Center (EOC) is an example. There are no restrictions on how the funds can be spent other than they will be for capital items like buildings, computers, vehicles. There are no requirements that funds be spent on priority items like roads vs another park or boondoggle building. There are no requirements that specified percentages be spent on taxpayer priorities, like 50% of County penny tax revenues should be spent on roads. Instead, the board or city council leaders can spend funds on projects based upon lobbyist and construction firm visits.
  1. Lack of Oversight & Transparency for some Constitutional Officer spending: There are many Sheriff vehicles and projects for his Department, but yet there are no budget hearings, no performance audits or published detailed budgets on his website. The County Board exercises zero oversight of his spending as well as other Constitutional Officers. Why give them any penny tax funds when they are not transparent?
  1. Do you trust current and future elected officials to not waste some of the $800-million? Why must the referendum be 15 years? Why not five year cycles to prevent long term waste?
  1. Does the County really need the funds? They just raised property taxes by 14%, so they have funds. There are numerous “taxing authorities” listed on your property tax trim notice like EMS. Yet the plan for this spending includes a shift of emotional capital spending objects like Ambulances from those accounts to this tax, freeing up funds for unknown uses. If this referendum does not pass, the Schools can still implement a referendum to get ½ a penny tax just for them, and cities can increase millage rates.
  1. Do the Schools Really Need the Money? The County Board and School Board waived Impact fees for three years, giving up $30-million in revenue, indicating they would rather give reduced impact fees to developers than collect funds for school buses, books and computers. They also used grant funds to analyze costs and found millions in savings, but they didn’t pay down bonds or hire more teachers. Instead the funds were spent on hiring more administrators, English Language learners and other non-classroom spending.
  1. County funds for roads should be taken from the General Fund - Lake County Board members ignored advice from the CFAC committee to allocate 8% from the general fund for roads, indicating they want to spend general funds from property taxes on favored projects rather than a taxpayer priority of roads.
  1. No Sales Tax Funds should be Allocated to Favored Developers or Residential projects like South Lake Sector Plan – Commissioner Sean Parks is pushing build out of the 16,000 South Lake Sector plan which requires many roads. The property owners who will gain from development should pay for that and no penny sales tax funds should be allocated to that or similar projects.
  1. Do the Cities really need the penny sales tax revenues? Not if you read Lauren Ritchie’s August 22, 2015 column about radically excess spending by Clermont HERE:

Our Recommendations: By voting NO to turn down this vague referendum, you can force the government to revise the wording of the referendum and the Ordinance to meet these conditions:

  1. Vote NO on the Nov. ballot in order to tell Board members no support for Yes votes until they include a prohibition on any Bond sales or borrowing. They should “pay as they go”. No more huge debt.
  2. Create a public committee to hammer out acceptable provisions for approving the tax.
  3. Demand that roads, city utility infrastructure and school student stations & buildings be the priority with specified percentage allocations like 50% roads, 80% student stations & 80% utilities.
  4. Demand that no sales tax funds be given to the Sheriff until there are public hearings over his $60+million budget AND he publishes three years of detailed budgets online, AND he approves an independent performance audit. The same applies to the other, but smaller Constitutional Officers.
  5. Demand the ballot wording be changed to exclude vague projects like “quality of life”.
  6. The County Government should agree to:
  7. Development of performance based metrics devised by the tax review committee and their inclusion in the department sections of the budget book and part of the budget review process.
  8. Public discussions by the Board of the performance audits issued by the County Inspector General.
  9. Beefed up oversight duties for the Sales Tax Committee.
  10. The School District should agree to:
  11. Consolidation of services for all Schools.
  12. Addition of another internal auditor to conduct performance audits.
  13. The Cities should agree to consolidate specified services with the County”
  14. Procurement operations
  15. Dispatch of police, fire and ambulance
  16. Inter-local agreements with the County to provide fastest first responders
  17. Vote NO until the ordinance is modified to resolve the above concerns.

Find our FiscalRangers.com page on this issue, with video links at:

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