A grass-roots petition drive in Fort Lauderdale will be starting soon!
Posted Under: City Employee Salaries,Economic Improvement Suggestions,Ft Lauderdale City Budget Issues,Important Issues for Fort Lauderdale
Call to Action!
A grass-roots petition drive in Fort Lauderdale will be starting soon!
After years of swollen budgets and wasteful City spending, Fort Lauderdale residents appear to have “had enough”. We saw our property values (and property taxes) increase by as much as 50% since 2004. Our City’s budget grew accordingly, increasing by as much as 15% in one year! Now, property values have declined by as much as 50%. Many Fort Lauderdale families are losing their jobs and their homes. All of us have to make do with less. Our City should be doing the same.
Yet our current Mayor and Commission continue to spend money lavishly, having just passed the biggest budget in Fort Lauderdale history and using up our precious fund reserves to close the budget gap. The budget today is not balanced. It has now grown to such a size that it can no longer be sustained in the future without tax increases, fee hikes, staff layoffs, or a combination of the three.
Mayor Jack Seiler has had two years now (with two budgets) to make the necessary reductions; yet he has lacked the willpower to do so. It appears that we must take action ourselves and send him a clear message: “CUT THE BUDGET AND REDUCE SPENDING”.
Within the next few weeks, I will be sending you a link to a “Budget Reform” petition document that is being drafted with the help of many Fort Lauderdale residents. We will need to get as many Fort Lauderdale registered voters to sign this document as possible. This document so far has gone through several versions, as we try to refine the message and insure that it is an enforceable document.
This will be a grass-roots effort, dependent upon YOU to help us collect signatures. “Signature Petition Binders” will be assembled for small business owners and for those who want to go through their neighborhood to collect signatures. An address will be given for you to mail in the completed forms.
Why are we doing this?
We are trying to avoid the situation that is happening right now in Miami-Dade, where a proposed tax increase is causing a recall drive against their Mayor. We also want to avoid a situation similar to what is happening now in the City of Miami, where mass layoffs of employees are proposed and lawsuits are forming. We are trying to “thread the needle”, with this petition. If successful, we’ll avoid both scenarios.
Know this. If we don’t get this budget reduced this year, we will have tax increases, more fee hikes, and employee layoffs waiting for us next year. And we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
For a better look at what’s been happening to our budget (versus the budget of a typical city our size), take a look below: This chart shows our City’s Budgets since 1997. The red bars show how rapidly the city budgets increased when our property values went up. The orange line shows the unsustainable growth trend of those budgets. The black line shows what a controlled budget growth (of 2% a year) would look like, had we limited our City’s budget to a growth rate similar to other cities. The purple diamond shows the current size of the average budget ($330 Million) of all 20 US cities that are similar in size to us (175K to 195K in population). The green bars show the approximate reduction we are looking to achieve over the next four years with our petition.
Fort Lauderdale' Budget Mess
If you would like to become an active participant in the final development of this petition, send an email to us at: earl@abetterftlauderdale.com. Once completed, we will be sending you the on-line link to the petition, along with supporting documentation and instructions. Stay tuned!
Earl Rynerson
Fort Lauderdale Committee for Budgetary Reform
Reader Comments
This is fantastic, I can’t wait to sign this petition. It’s time we do something about this issue and send a message that the citizens aren’t going to accept this spending pattern anymore
Thank Earl
I vote for a recall drive against the Mayor. Why not solve the problem at its root…
Earl, if possible, can I get a full page copy of the Fort Lauderdale Budget Mes chart. I think the chart is like a picture worth a thousand words. My address is:
3850 Galt Ocean Drive, APT 911 Fort Lauderdale 33308
Thanks
We will have color copies of that chart available for you soon.
Earl
You can depend on my signature for sure! Geoff
I agree we need to get the existing Commission under control, or we will all become poorer. Rixon
Sign me up NOW, Earl. The petition is long overdue in my opinion.
I’ve seen the worst of this city (our illustrious non-resident Mayor Cox) to the best (still waiting) for the past 26 years. Of late I have been incensed by the lack of services replete with an attitude. Who is working for whom?
I trust next Mayoral election we will see your name back on the ballot!
The message below is what I have sent a few of my resident friends of Ft. Laud. I’m trying to pass the word around best I can. We have allowed for a runaway government for years. If we don’t take action now we will be going to bankruptcy (and I don’t mean the city…the residents) FAST!
“Please read. Our taxes have been going up and will continue to do so. We need to find a way to put a stop to it or we will just have to continue to pay more and more year after year.
Miami is in the process of trying to overthrow everyone including the Mayor because of this. They also have a lawsuit against the city for tax hikes. They are being proactive, we need to do the same.”
Gladys
It’s time we do something about it,why dint reduced the expences on all comunities and cities,and CUT OR REDUCED THE HIGH PAID EMPLOYEES(is a lot of people unployment how will do same job for less)enough is enough is time to rebuild USA,and our BUDGETS.
We need to wake up like this city
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xchk4oQLuW0&feature=related
We need to wake up….period. I’ve been a resident of Florida all of my life. I was born in Miami and Florida was the 1st state to sue the Federal government for having to take in the financial burden of immigrants. Both legal and illegal. While the Federal government paid no attention to the infulx of immigrants in this country, states like FL, CA, TX and others were taking the financial burden. So we spread the debt. Once we sued, the rest followed suit hence where we are today after many years of immigrants and discussion. It is now a national problem not just designated to those living by the border. What I mean by all this, is that at that time, we were first in doing such an outlandish, extraordinary thing by suing our OWN Federal Government. We should continue on the same path and do the same towards each city and county that is allowing the abuse of it’s hardworking citizens. Bell City, CA (tiny by comparison) and Miami have taken action, let’s be bold and do the same. I will try my best to see you tomorrow night. I am a designer who caters to the marine industry. I have work to complete prior to the show opening Thurs the 28th. If I am able, I will surely attend.
Regarding the budget growth, how did that correlate to population and new development tax revenue growth?
Just about all of the new luxury condos went online in the 2004-2006 time period, which interjected a lot of new, affluent people into the community as well as new revenues.
Earl’s graphs just don’t account for events. Fort Lauderdale had a population growth of 21% from 2000-2007. You’re not going to get a linear city budget growth when you have a city in transition. This isn’t to say that our budget isn’t bloated; only that this analysis isn’t very good.
Let’s see, 9 new luxury high rise condos and condo hotels open in a 2 year period and the budget goes up 15%. I don’t know anyone who can say that’s too much without a more substantive analysis than a graph.