A Dumb Game.

It was a long Commission meeting tonight.  It lasted about two hours.  That doesn't seem long, except there was about 45-60 minutes of material.  No one I consulted was sure where the time went.

A presentation that could have taken a lot of time took almost no time.  The Consent Agenda was reasonably quick.  A few Commissioners commented that they expected a bigger crowd for discussion of the sanitation fee, and some of us in the audience were surprised, too.  But few were there, and there wasn't much to discuss.

The fact is, I was going to call this post "The Sublime, and the Ridiculous," to illustrate the contrast between Roxy Ross and the the four stooges.  It was frankly breathtaking.  Roxy was serious, detailed, exploratory, well organized, and clearly concerned about Village residents.  The rest were bumbling, inept, and ultimately had no meaning.  But I decided to focus on something else.  I wanted to focus on the discussion about the sanitation budget.

At one point, a propos of nothing in particular, Tracy "Big Mama" Truppman was trying to explain the increase in the sanitation charge, and she talked about how the Village was essentially padding the bill, for the sake of general Village finances.  She didn't want anyone to think they were being scammed, but just that this was a way to recover some money for Village staff expenses.  And she wasn't wrong about that.  She was right, and I agree with her.  She was addressing the Village's limited fiscal resources.

But here's the problem.  The Village has for some years now charged Village homeowners a property tax millage of 9.7.  For years, no one has wanted to change this millage.  Apparently, it feels consistent to Commissioners, and maybe to non-Commissioner residents.  It's the same number-- 9.7-- year after year.  But this number of mills-- 9.7-- has no meaning.  It's just a number.  The same number of mills every year is not the same tax to homeowners, and it's not the same revenue to the Village.  It's 9.7 mills, but that millage is applied to property values, which change every year.

Even if property-owners get a homestead exemption, which is what 80% of Village property owners do, the value of their properties can still change every year.  And they do.  If property values go down, as they did in 2008 and 2009, the tax goes down.  If they go up, as they do most years, the tax goes up.  The value in getting a homestead exemption is that if assessed values go up, the assessment on homesteaded properties, for taxation purposes, can only go up by 3%.  So a 9.7 mills taxation one year is a different tax than the same 9.7 mills tax another year.

The reason it's important to remember this is that when someone like Tracy "Big Mama" Truppman talks about fiscal constraints, which she would like her neighbors to know can be slightly ameliorated by a manipulation in the sanitation tax, the fiscal constraint is a self-inflicted problem.  It was Tracy and her stooges who did not increase the ad valorem tax rate above 9.7 mills.  They could have.  Any Commission could.  It's odd and a little grating to hear Tracy complain about fiscal constraints, when she has taken a role in imposing those constraints.  And that idiotic discussion took up a certain amount of time in tonight's meeting.  For one thing, we paid our attorney $165 an hour to listen to Tracy explain to her neighbors why she advocated for charging them an inflated sanitation fee, which was in consequence to deciding not to charge them the taxation rate they should have been paying anyway.  It was, as I said in the title of this post, a "dumb game."

There was one other dumb game during the Commission meeting tonight.  It was about board appointments.  I applied to be on the Public Safety Board, but suddenly, there were seven new applicants-- gee, I wonder how that happened-- so I withdrew my application.  I knew Tracy and the stooges wouldn't appoint me to the Public Safety Board-- they no longer had to, since there were these suddenly interested Village residents-- and I decided to apply to be on the Parks and Parkways Board instead.  It was my impression that that board needed members, and I needed something to do.

But I was wrong.  It turned out P&P already had what was essentially a full complement of members, except that Randy Wagoner's membership had lapsed, and he had to reapply.  Which he did.  So there was only one real opening, and Randy and I both applied.  There was great confusion about the count of which Commissioners voted to seat which one of us-- me and Randy.  The Clerk said twice that three Commissioners chose me for first choice, and two chose Randy.  I thought this was very odd, since it was announced that Roxy Ross, Big Mama, and Will Tudor chose me for a first choice.  Will Tudor gets confused sometimes as to what Big Mama demands that he do, but Big Mama never gets confused.  Why would she have voted for me as a first choice?  After some fumbling around, the vote was re-announced, and this time, Randy got three first place votes, and I got two.  So Randy was back on the Board, as he should have been.  What was funny about this, apart from the long time it took to count the votes, was that I later learned that Big Mama had asked for a recount.  It was as if Big Mama somehow knew in advance how the vote was supposed to come out.  I wonder how she knew.