Stop the massive tax hike
Over the last eight years Marco Island’s operating budget grew from $25.5M in FY2017 to $31.9M in FY 2025, an increase of $6.5M over eightyears, the equivalent of a 2.4% average annual growth rate.
Inflation in six of eight of those years ranged from 1.4%-3.4%, (excluding two years of COVID and federal spending induced inflation). The narrative that the city has been starved of money is false. It has been run as one of the most financially conservative and responsible local governments in Florida and perhaps the entire country. Kudos to the city leaders that achieved what few others do.
During this era of $25 million budgets, the city paid down millions in debt, built a beautiful Veterans Park, a new emergency command center and fire station to withstand Cat 5 hurricanes, it rebuilt and widened the bridge on Collier at Smokehouse Bay, just to name a few major multimillion infrastructure improvements. The narrative that the city cannot improve infrastructure with budgets at these levels is false. It is simply a matter of prudently prioritizing projects. Instead, the city is orchestrating an effort to forcibly confiscate more money from the homeowners on Marco.
City Council moved to increase the city’s operating budget from $31.9M to $42.4M, an increase of $10.5M in a single year, raising the millage tax rate by an astounding 34%. This will create a new baseline of annual spending moving forward that will be nearly impossible to cut back in the future.
It is time to pump the brakes on this reckless spending and return to principles of fiscal conservatism. No increase in the mill rate will still provide the city with millions in new revenue.
Peter Rigas, Marco Island
Fountain of truth?
From virtual assistants to the fountain of truth? It seems like quite a leap! Navigating a summer vacation in Europe using the power of AI is one thing. Trusting AI to educate us honestly about the history of humankind is quite another.
Recently Elon Musk, the founder of X and the founder of xAi was awarded a $200 million governmental contract for its Grok application. Apparently, his company won the bid and Grok purportedly offers Americans a platform the president and his administration feel will greatly benefit Americans. Despite reports of X having had continual technical problems, it also reports X having censored specific speech while allowing specific inflammatory speech. Now, the founder’s new application xAI is supposed to be different. It claims to be ‘designed to be maximally truthful, useful and curious.’ However, despite these claims, Grok has already demonstrated having an antisemitism problem. We must remember AI is a form of technology and not a divine source. Its foundation is based on the founder who happens to be human.
As I think about the potential subjective drawbacks of Grok, I recall another extensive, expensive government funded project designed to help Americans. It came into effect in the 1940’s and was championed by the Federal Housing Administration under President Harry S. Truman. Its goal was to address the dire need for housing for G.I.s returning after WWII. The company to fill that need starting along Long Island’s North Shore was Levitt & Sons. They had perfected constructing a new house every 16 minutes and they called their cookie-cutter community Levittown! That was great news for the government and great news for a lot of veterans, just not great news for the veterans who were Jewish or black Americans.
The FHA had very restrictive covenants excluding those groups from using their G.I. benefits to purchase homes in Levittown. The argument was that admitting those groups would negatively impact home values. Nonetheless, Levitt & Sons was contracted to build thousands of government subsidized homes regardless of their overt racist covenants and practices. The correlation I see here nearly eighty years later, is our government once again funding an expensive taxpayer funded project replete with prejudices and misinformation designed once again to exalt the masses and demonize countless others. Just another example of a project for ‘the greater good!’
Lance McCormack, Marco Island
Unfair to Marco finance director
The Marco Island Council chairman found the auditor’s letter in the audit document that claimed a material weakness in the internal controls by the auditors. I assume that the chairman confronted the city manager of that fact and that is when emotions set in. They both were running without the facts.
Based on my experience in top management I assumed that the city manager confronted the finance director to either RESIGN or I will FIRE you. And that is what the finance director did. Rather than wait until the auditors made their presentation to the City Council, all hell broke loose. Another councilor recommended a forensic audit be conducted. When the auditors did make the presentation to Council, the audit was clean.
Having known the city finance director since 2012 when I was on City Council, I found him to be the most qualified to perform those duties. The finance director in the past not only performed duties as finance director, he served as interim city manager three times when City Council was in the process of hiring a new city manager. The city manager and the City Council are the ones that I question, are they qualified to do their jobs! I never heard anyone apologize to the finance director for the injustice you perpetrated.
Amadeo Petricca, Marco Island
This article originally appeared on Marco Eagle: Letters to the Editor, August 8
Reporting by Marco Eagle / Marco Eagle
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