MILT THOMAS
For the past 20 years, Vero Beach’s Kiwanis Club has held the Take a Kid Fishing tournament under the Barber Bridge. The tournament has become something of a tradition in the community. It is open to all kids between 6-12 years old along with a parent, grandparent, or in the case of troubled kids, a mentor or Youth Guidance counselor. Many of these kids have never fished before. Kiwanis pays for all the fishing equipment and provides a free hamburger and hot dog cookout before awarding prizes. This year almost 200 kids participated and Kiwanis fed over 300 people at club expense. So what’s the problem?
Al Sammartino, the Kiwanian who made all arrangements for the tournament, wanted to secure the fishing pier for this special day (the first Saturday after school lets out in June) for the next three years, but was told by the Recreation Department that they could only rent it for one year. In addition, the permit fee was now going to be $170. It was $50 for many years, raised to $100 this year, now $170. Sammartino was upset because this has always been a community activity at no charge to the public (and little or no cost to the city). Frankly, if all the kids “happened” to show up on that day, no permit would be needed.
But this is the age of indiscriminate budget slashing. After the Recreation Department weathered three successive years of budget cuts at the same time they were serving more citizens, it has reached a point where the cuts are beginning to affect our quality of services. As has been pointed out by others, there are ways to improve the efficiency of city government that reduce cost but are transparent to taxpaying citizens. Why aren’t those options being considered first?
As Councilman Winger has said, if a company slashed costs by compromising the quality of its consumer products, it would lose customers and ultimately fail. No doubt the CEO and top management of such a company would be fired. Elected officials responsible for this insensitive cost cutting of services can also be fired at the next election. They should keep that in mind before firing lifeguards, outsourcing the city cemetery or taking out their cost cutting frenzy on little kids looking forward to their first fishing experience.
Indian River Guardian 
Great comments by Dick Winger. I’m not saying this would be easy, but I’d like to see the city council get creative and try to figure out how to make money instead of slashing the budget (even though reducing it is probably warranted in some areas). I know people don’t want their taxes raised, but I think it needs to happen. I’m not sure the city council members would risk their jobs over it, though. How about some research and a resulting story on how much money could be raised by bringing our city taxes up to a fair rate. – Vicky Gould
Maybe some of those who have gotten money as transactional attorneys should learn what the real costs have been.
I have to agree that raising our taxes is probably a necessity if we’re to maintain the kinds of services we’ve been used to having. I do think the jobs of the Council members are already on the line. The whole city is on shaky ground. I have no child to involve in any fun event, but I’d sure hate to see this kid recreational event sponsored by the Kiwanis organization go by the wayside.
How about cutting pay and benefits. Holding the line on cost is called good management, anybody can raise prices. Should have learned the lesson from the utilities by now.
Read Dick Winger’s column as it has good ideas. But I still think our taxes could go up a bit to help keep the services that are so important to us. – Vicky Gould