^(My apologies ahead of time for the long read.)
^(Whether you support or are against our great City raising taxes on residents. I urge you to vote on May 5th.) ^(Here) ^(is an area you can check out to verify where you can go vote. I believe some of the locations have changed since our last vote.)
^(I do ask you to consider this when you do go to vote:)
- ^(Do you feel that Athens City Admin have been good stewards of the funds that they have had access to up until now?)
^(IMO, I do not see that Athens City officials deserve to be rewarded with a new tax increase. Mayor Patterson and crew have stated jobs will be cut if this vote goes down. To that I ask, why not start at the top then?)
- ^(Let us go back 5 years. There have been multiple projects that seem to have been completed in a rushed manner with what seems to be a tiny or no final inspection. Intersection of Madison and E. State, various sidewalk installs, Joneswood’s repaving job. I’m not blaming the city for the house slip. I do blame them for not rebuilding the road instead of dumping a ton of new asphalt on a road known to the city to slip.)
- ^(If we paid a well-trained scam artist $700k taxpayer dollars. Would we still have a job?)
- ^(From my past conversations with city street crews. Past Athens city administrations have a long-standing bad habit of “kicking the can down the road”. The examples they used were sewage and water lines. Do you feel that this current administration will do anything differently?)
^(I have not come to this decision lightly because in the end I do not want to see a good employee lose their job. However, I strongly feel that there is fat to be trimmed at the administrative level before any firing of a staff member and any tax increase. At the very least some sort of pay reduction for leaders who are making boneheaded decisions like moving to Rumpke to save money. (Spoiler, our home’s bill went up when the city switched))
^(I welcome diplomatic discourse here. As I know in the end, I am not the brightest crayon in the box. This tax increase that we are being asked to vote for does not feel justified to me. Thank you for your understanding, civil discourse and most importantly your time.)