It's Your Money

According to media coverage the overall US economy MAY have turned the corner and is beginning to recover. The stock market has made phenomenal gains from the 2008 lows over the last few months. Press reports this week indicate that a number of local capital improvement project contracts are coming in at millions of dollars under the amounts budgeted due to reduced building costs from private companies. We are extremely happy with all of these developments, but believe we need to add a word of caution. Good news, especially premature good news, could cause our elected officials to return to their old bad habits. We already hear of efforts to redirect millions saved on projects such as the Green River Parkway to new projects. The County Commission proposes to raise property taxes and transfer essential services into “assessment” programs that can be used to raise and hide their expenses. This is all being done even as the official forecast for the next year or two is for a continuing drop in property values and tax revenues from a weakened local economy with high unemployment rates.

Unfortunately, most of Martin County’s governments have still not correctly responded to the local economic conditions. Yes, they have had layoffs; they have shortened workweeks, they have postponed buying capital equipment and some unions have “voluntarily” given up raises. The problem that has not been addressed is the total personnel cost of individual employees. Here we do not necessarily mean their pay, although there are some excessive salaries and much attention was focused earlier this year on the County’s $100,000 “club”. As we reported at the time, there are some 1,600 employees of local government entities (not including Schools) and 140 earned over $100,000 last year. The breakdown of these $100K earners (using 2008 figures) sheds a lot more light on the subject.

County Commission (less Fire/EMS): 22 of appx.650 (3.4%)

County Fire/EMS: 81 of appx. 260(31.2%)

Sheriff’s Dept.: 20 of appx.575 (3.5%)

City of Stuart 8 of appx. 250 (3.2%)

Constitutional Offices 7 of appx. 235 (2.9%)

Just having a $100,000+ yearly pay is not a reason for indictment, criticism or even envy. It is often false economy to hire the cheapest possible labor to do a job and there are certainly posts in the County that require the education, personal risk/skill, experience level and responsibility to deserve this type of salary.

The real problem is that the TOTAL cost of our local government personnel consumes at least 85% (to as high as 97%) of all the operational budgets we have examined. This includes various benefit packages that dwarf anything available in the private sector. There are generous retirement plans, overtime pay for management level personnel, individual and family health coverage, virtually automatic longevity pay increases, paid vacation days, personal days and sick days.

- We were disappointed with the Commission’s initial stand on funding of their individual Municipal Service Taxing Units. These MSTUs are a Commissioner’s specific taxes only charged to residents in their district and used to fund their constituents’ local projects. There is currently $6.7 million in these accounts with another $230,000 budgeted for 2010. While not huge tax dollars, the average millage for these accounts is up 13.5% this year. This is not demonstrating the right Commission leadership for a time when there are many County layoffs/furloughs. We believe that each Commissioner should have a yearly MSTU stipend of $25–50,000 to use as seed money for volunteer projects and district activities. Any funds not spent should be refunded to the individual district by a direct reduction to the next year’s MSTU millage. Any project needing more resources or multi-year support should have to compete before the entire Commission for County-wide funding. We applaud Ms Valliere for zeroing her 2010 MSTU funds and highlighting the issue.

n summary, there were pluses and disappointments and we do not agree with some of the County Commission decisions, particularly those mentioned above and the 8+% increase in 2010 property tax millage. However, Ms Kryzda, Acting County Commissioner, should be thanked for melded County departments’ and Constitutional inputs with numerous Commissioner “instructions” into a well-run, efficient presentation

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