For what seems to be many years, your Taxpayers Association has urged government to consider efficiency and cost reduction in their capital budgets. Capital budgets are focused on durable items like buildings, parks, fire engines and schools.

We have been increasingly alarmed by the costs of schools. The reported cost of a student station rose dramatically from $13,000 to $33,000 each in just a few years. Cost increases were blamed on rapidly rising material and labor costs. We understood that to a degree, but really thought there were savings available by looking closely at the design of these schools. We know that today’s schools don’t look much like the schools we attended in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. Today’s schools are high tech, almost like yesterday’s colleges. We also realize the great burden that we the voters put on our school systems by adopting the class size reduction amendment. Even so we continue to question the design and resultant cost of our schools.

That is why we were very happy to read of the School Board’s recent decision to increase the capacity of the newly planned Elementary School to be located west of Palm City. The capacity was increased by reducing the size of the class rooms within the school but not increasing the size of the building. Brilliant! Makes sense that if you have fewer students per class room you can get by just fine with smaller rooms. Seems like there may even be other benefits like reduced operating costs affected by smaller rooms.

The increase in capacity of our schools will result in a dramatic decrease in the need for land as well. Increasing an elementary school capacity from 750 to 950 eliminates 20% of our needs. With land prices continuing to skyrocket as our urban services district is crammed full, this makes tremendous financial sense. This also cuts back on the need for Administrators, Principals, Nurses, Librarians, Cooks and playgrounds.

We strongly urge the School Board to expand on this idea. Refiguring class sizes in our High Schools and Middle Schools would really save serious money.

We also were very impressed with the actions of our Sheriff and his Staff. Bringing in experts to reduce the cost of electricity to operate our jails was a very welcome idea. We are told to expect to save hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. We look forward to the same attention to the cost of patrol cars. Maybe a more efficient car? Maybe reducing un-needed use of all County owned vehicles?

The County Utilities Department too showed us some innovation by converting an unused water storage tank into office space. Must be spooky working in there, but we do appreciate their efforts to save their customers money.

These efforts should be infectious. Can the Fire Departments follow suit? Can the Parks Department find savings? Could the energy costs of our Libraries, Courthouse, and other buildings be similarly reduced?

How about the County Commission? Cutting back on the length and number of meetings would be a great start. Use your staff more efficiently. We don’t need Commissioners debating every minute detail while a very expensive staff and the public sit and watch.

Bravo to our School Board and to the Architects that came up with this simple but really effective idea. Bravo to the Sheriff and his staff, and to FPL for their help in cutting operating costs.

We can only hope that our County Commission and City Commissions will follow suit. We believe that today’s technology should be a tool to reduce the size of our government. We need to look at how we use our buildings. We need to find ways to use our employees more efficiently. We need to cut back on the number of publicly owned vehicles.

We continue to be disappointed in our County and City governments for not rolling back their millages more than the piddly percentage we were given. As the real estate market cools, the amount of taxable values will decrease as will the growth rate of new construction. Combine this with an ever increasing size and cost of government, and you have the perfect storm brewing a financial crisis.

We simply have to have more innovative thinking and implementation of costs savings as we have just seen with our School Board, Sheriff, and Utilities Dept. Maybe we need to bring in some more efficiency experts, architects, and energy specialists. Do more with less. We on the private side are having to do so in order to pay our taxes and insurance increases.