Take your ha'penny and shov... wait, that's mine!

At the water-cooler today, I overheard rumors that the half-cent sales tax was retracted, that the people have stood up on their wooden pulpits and shaken their angry fists at the aether enough so that all others have been persuaded (or cowed) into agreeing.

I can't say that I'm not disappointed, but not for the reason you may think. I am an advocate of school funding, especially funding that will better the environments that my, and your, children will be working in, and this 1/2 sales tax could provide 18 million dollars per year to the schools! That the schools will no longer have that funding is a disappointment, everything else -- well, let's see:

If any of you have look around at where the money from the last 9 years has been spent you will see that it is not fairly distributed. My daughter is in a classroom that has plastic tarps strung from the ceiling like slides to funnel water into a garbage can. Other schools have cities of portable buildings. While other schools get new classrooms, gymnasiums, and top of the line weight rooms.

While I don't doubt that some of the money has been spent wisely, it is quite obvious that a majority of it has not been. When deciding where to spend money on schools you should look at needs first, wants second. Sure we want our children to be lifting weights, at least more than we want them in safe and clean classrooms (*cough*bullshit*cough*) but let's think about what we need.

On top of that there are bigger issues that we are not going to resolve by shuffling money away behind the registers to pay for funding that the county should be paying for! Did you know that Florida ranks 40th in the whole united states for education funding? Did you also know that the top-10 ranked schools in regards to education are also the top 10 for funding? Hmmm.. strange correlation there, I'm shocked and surpised

Of course, we aren't speaking about the state budget for education, we are talking about the county budget. They are the ones trying to tax us to fund the schools, right? A brief peek into the county budget shows that our expenditures have raised $43,718,274 from FY04-05 to FY06-07, nothing wrong with that either? Well -- considering that our "Reserves" account for the largest portion of our budgetary expenditures at a whopping $58,740,258 -- of which $20,335,315 is accounted for in non-operating expenses and refunds.

That leaves a large healthy reserve, which is being spent on who knows what, and also if one looks at our budget we see massive changes across the board in the last few years (since FY04-05) which have led to a more than 31% increase in our budgetary expenses in total, not just the massive raise in the General fund --- why should we shoulder another tax burden to support our ever-bloating bureaucracy? Our county has not expanded by an amount that warrants a 31% increase!!

I'm sure that somewhere we could find the ability to trim the fat and supply adequate funding to our schools, even though our state has completely failed us. Until I start seeing the county pushing to keep the expenditures moderated I will continue to check [NO] on any sales tax increases. Sorry.