Posted by
Ed Lilly on Saturday, March 15, 2008 10:05:05 AM
The weekly local paper in Lawrence Township, the Lawrence Ledger, ran a front page story on Thursday explaining the Township Council has been "stunned by the loss of $391,000 in state aid..." Certainly, I can think of plenty of things I could do with a nice chunk of change like that. But reading the rest of the sentence only serves to make my blood boil once again as I ponder the effectiveness and overall competence of elected officials. For the remainder of the sentence explains that "Township Council has directed Municipal Manager Richard Krawczun to re-examine the proposed $39.9 million budget for 2008."
Wow. The Township Council is running things so tightly that they are "stunned" by the loss of a grand total of 1% of the PROPOSED budget?! Reading the story carefully, it is never explained what the 2007 budget figure was, and I'll bet dollars to donuts that the $39.9 million proposal is an increase of more than 1% over the previous year's budget.
Yep. A quick noodling around on the Lawrence Township website shows that the 2007 budget figure was $38,266,244. Taking the $39.9 million figure as accurate, that's a proposed INCREASE of $1,633,756 from last year's budget. That's a 4% increase being proposed. And obviously there's simply no way in the world that the Township could get by if they only increased the budget by 3%.
No doubt Mr. Krawczun and Township Council will now spend weeks and hundreds of man-hours trying to figure out how to reconfigure the proposed budget to avoid a complete meltdown of life in Lawrence Township. Any resident with common sense could probably spend a couple of hours on Wednesday afternoon and figure out a dozen different ways to cut out at least $400,000 from the proposed budget that would work just fine.
Prediction? No way in the world a bunch of elected officials and bureaucrats find a way to get by with a little less. Taxes and/or fees will be raised in hopes of generating more revenue from the taxpayers.