Coral Springs voters are not suckers. Overwhelmingly they voted against what would have been a more than 215 % increase to Coral Springs city commissioner’s salaries. With a 45% turnout in the Nov 7th election the resolution was defeated 15,386 to 10,815.
This has to be a wakeup call to our city commissioners who think that just because very few people turn out to commission meetings doesn’t mean that the voting population isn’t paying attention. If only they were less hoggish about the amount of an increase, then maybe they would have received something,. However large salaries for our commissioners are not needed since our city does not have a Strong Mayor type of government. Instead we have a very well paid city manager to run the affairs of our city. He does this this under the control of an elected part time city commission who’s members should have other jobs outside of their elected ones to pay the majority of their wages.
The system has worked so far, with our city being the most financially sound municipality in the United States. There was no reason to change it and certainly no reason to have given the huge increases that the city commissioners were asking . Now if any city commissioner feels that they are not getting paid enough they can either resign or not run again in the next election. No one should be in it for the money when running for office in our city.
Defeated as well were two large spending measures that the Broward County commission had asked the public for. One of them was to float a 450 million dollar bond to repair the court houses. The other was the Penny tax which would have increase the sales tax in the county by 1%, from 6% to 7%. to add more money to the already incompetent county wide transportation system. They called it the Penny Tax since 1% of a dollar is a penny. They failed to realize that taxpayers know mathematics and very few spend only a dollar. They knew quite well that if they called it what it really was, a 16.7% increase in the sales tax rate, they would have a hard time selling it to the public.
In both cases few details were given to the public about how our elected officials would spend the money. With revenues from property taxes at an all time high, fiscal responsibility was more on the minds of the taxpayers than providing the county with more money to spend, irresponsibly.
In an election where the Democrats have won in what I would call a landslide, the defeat of a bond, the penny tax and the 215% increase to the city commissioner’s wages is very “Republican” of us, don’t you think?
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