On February 15th, Clayton's Woke Liberal council majority, Cloven,Tillman and Wolfe, voted to spend $30,000 to hire a consultant to survey Clayton residents to determine if they would support a new tax (Councilmembers Diaz and Wan voted against the survey.
The Council wants to put a tax measure on the ballot in November at a cost of another $17,000 to $20,000. Total taxpayer cost for this fiasco is around $50,000.
According to the staff report the city will need a new parcel tax of least $200 per parcel to maintain existing city services. The consultants were hired to determine how much of a tax increase Clayton taxpayers would support/tolerate up to $400 per parcel.
Given the current state of the economy, we don't need to hire a consultant to determine the potential success of a new tax---the outcome will be a strong "No" with another adjective in front of it. This is another complete waste of taxpayer money at a time when they say we have a pending budget shortfall of about $672,000.
Here is the situation: According to the Pioneer, the city goes from a $56,000 deficit last fiscal year and a projected $8,000 surplus this fiscal year to a projected $672,000 deficit next fiscal year.
For the last 35 plus years Clayton has always maintained a balanced budget under the strong leadership of very competent city managers and proactive city councils.
Even during recession years and during the years when the State took huge amounts of money from the cities to balance their budget, Clayton's leaders balanced ours. So how did we get in this mess? How did we go from an $8,000 surplus to a 672,000 deficit in one year? What has changed? Well, we have a new city manager (one year on the job) a novice mayor last year (Wolfe) and a novice mayor this year (Cloven)--- Incompetence? Pretty telling.
Their answer, lets spend $30.000 to hire a consultant to tell them what we citizens already know and then try to raise taxes.
How about cutting cost? How about determining why we have a $700,000 cost increase in one year? I know how we can save $200,000 right away.
Final thought: The woke council majority, say they support more affordable housing in Clayton and at the same time want to raise taxes on homeowners and make the cost of home ownership more unaffordable--Hypocrites.
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