about my county st johns county florida

Okay, I must mention this before I address some of the elements of the St Augustine Record interview with Ann Taylor.

Why, in heaven’s name, would any individual who is putting themselves out to their community to become an elected official, making important decisions about the County and its future, allow themselves to be part of “the Anns?’  It reminds me of elementary school.

That simple statement says to me that they can’t win on their own merits, and so have to rely on Commissioner Joseph, Nicole Crosby, and each other in their campaigns.  Jeepers.  Don’t we want county commissioners that can think for themselves?

Oh, I know, the Anns, et al., are accusing the incumbents of not thinking for themselves and doing developers bidding.  Maybe that’s why they feel the need to band together. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for proof (not innuendo) that the incumbents are taking orders from developers.  But my experience tells me that the incumbents spend a great deal of time working alongside developers and residents trying to benefit the county, as a whole.

And now back to the interview

So, Ann Taylor is “convinced that the present commissioners ‘waste tax dollars’ and then ‘ask for more,’ while representing the developers and not the residents.”  Remember that commissioners represent both.  They make decisions in the best interests of the county, not what a small group of residents wants.

Her statement alone is problematic.  Have you ever looked at our County’s budget?  It is a complicated weave of tax dollars, grants, reserves, and restricted funds allocated across multiple divisions and departments, each with a different mission.  Waste?  That is an overreaching claim that is unfair and unsubstantiated.  For a candidate for public office to be so naive as to state a personal opinion without substantiation is highly misleading and just wrong.

She says she supports a rollback. 

Could it be that she feels her potential constituents are so in need relief from the higher taxes on their much-higher value property that she is willing to take the county expenses backwards? 

Think of a rollback this way. Your company has decided to give everyone a pay cut – business is not good.  Your pay was $60,000 but it rolled back to $58,824.  Things get better for the company, so for the next four years you get a 3% increase to your base. Had the rollback not occurred, you would have received $7,531 in pay raises over the four years.  Because 3% was added on to the rolled back amount, the four increases provide you only $6,206 in pay raises.  You have lost $1,324 because of the rollback.

Now think about that same concept with a $25 million rollback to the property tax millage rate  What gets cut? We have to “keep the lights on” – basic safety needs. What then is considered expendable?  And no, I don’t think Kevin Kline’s approach to cutting the US budget works in real life.

Once a rollback is taken, it’s gone for good. That is not to be taken lightly.

Reliance on trashing the incumbents

Even after the firefighter kerfuffle, when the two Anns were called out for lying in a letter, Ann Taylor continues to claim that fire, rescue and law enforcement are underpaid and understaffed and that “the Anns” will take care of them.  Seems to me like a solution looking for a problem to fix, since the current Commissioners have been exceedingly supportive of first responders.

Taylor certainly deflected the question about Henry Dean’s integrity and used the time-worn “data” that Nicole Crosby has been posting on Facebook for 10 months – data that has no context but is simply intended to rile folks up.  Then Taylor makes the leap from developer contributions to Dean’s campaign leading to Dean being in the pocket of developers.  That is a very mean and nasty inference for anyone running for public office to make about a public servant.

But, of course, she is going to let the reader “put two and two” together.  She doesn’t want to say it, so she offers the inference.  Another modus operandi of the Joseph, Crosby and Anns group.

She says transparency is important and that an HOA president watched while a bulldozer cleared land near the community because the HOA President didn’t know it was going to happen.  I’m having trouble believing that the HOA president didn’t know about and receive regular information from the Neighborhood Bill of Rights program.

I’m not sure I understand her response to the question about affordable workforce housing enough to even comment.

Our collective choice

To repeat how I ended my last post about the Anne-Marie interview, that brings home the pickle that we are in.  People want things to be different.  Someone steps in to claim they can make things different.  People want so badly to believe it and so they cast their vote for a promise.

St Johns County is still trying to get out from under the problem created in 2008 by the financial crisis when so much development was encouraged and approved so that the county could simply survive economically.  

The choice that voters make in this August 20 primary is critical. 

Do we want a thriving community where we can live, work, and play (even as we learn to navigate the crowds and visitors), or do we want our tax dollars to go to unending litigation because the commissioners are voting “en bloc” (which, by the way, is illegal) to slow development?