COMMENTARY 

MARK SCHUMANN

As Vice Mayor Jay Kramer put it yesterday at the opening of three days of workshops on the 2015-2016 budget, the pendulum has swung on the Vero Beach City Council.  Gone are the days of pay freezes and continual cuts in services.  Gone is a reluctance, in the face of constant criticism from the barrier island press and from the Tea Party crowd, to do what is right for the city and for its employees. Gone is the cowardly practice of failing to be honest with the public about what level of tax support the city needs to maintain its infrastructure and to provide the services many Vero Beach residents say they want for themselves and for the city’s visitors.

When Councilman Randy Old, a retired bank executive, compared the city’s funding needs to its current sources of revenue, it was clear to him there was no way to move forward responsibly without proposing a significant tax increase. As Old pointed out in proposing a 30 percent increase in the city’s ad valorem tax rate, the net effect for city residents will be a 3 percent increase in their over all property tax bills.  Further, Old said, the move will still leave Vero Beach in the bottom 25th percentile among Florida cities. Put another way, three out of four cities in the state charge their residents higher taxes than does Vero Beach.

Though the pendulum has swung, as Kramer put it, the Vice Mayor and candidate for the Indian River County Commission does not seem entirely pleased. Describing the proposed tax increase as something more than he is willing to “stomach,” Kramer said he would have preferred to build the coming year’s budget on last years numbers, only increasing where there is public outcry for changes.

“I’d like to start at a budget that is comparable from last year’s and add in.  God help you. I hope you are right, but if you are wrong, all of the sudden the pendulum swings and you get a different philosophy on council.”

Councilwoman Amelia Graves said, “We can wax nostalgic about what we didn’t do, or we can move forward and go through this.”

Old added, “When we sat down before, we looked at a whole lot of different things…When we sat around and looked at all the projects we had, we had almost no option but to suggest a significant tax increase. And I thought that was a pretty fair process that we went through.”

“We’ve got to face it some time,” said Mayor Richard Winger. “We were elected to do what is proper, and I think the proper thing is to try to set the revenue so that we can meet the expectations of the people.”

Councilwoman Pilar Turner, who reminded everyone that she agreed to support a tax increase during her most recent campaign, said she wants increased spending to be used to address the city’s unfunded liabilities, such as its pension obligations and other unfunded retirement benefits, namely medical.

While public input in no doubt helpful, valuable, even essential, Kramer is confusing representative government with town hall government. He and his fellow council members were elected to represent the people of Vero Beach. They were elected to take a position on what level of spending the city needs to provide the services they believes the public wants. They were elected to lead.