There are a few points that all Belknap County tax payers need to keep in mind while digesting the latest budgetary bill of goods being foisted upon us by our so-called leaders. First of all, without getting too deep into the minutia, the county’s Commissioners and Convention have refused to publicly acknowledge they are in a default budget status. Thanks to their mishandling of the process, they were forced to adopt the original commissioners’ budget as presented back in December, which totaled $26,172,237, rather than their final intended spending plan of $26,620,211—a difference of $447,974.
The next step was for the big spenders to recoup this “lost” money with a supplemental budget. Instead of simply creating a new, separate budget to “supplement” the existing default budget, the commissioners cooked up a scheme to re-submit their intended spending plan as the “supplemental budget”, thus obfuscating the real increases in spending and the fact that they screwed up to begin with. When studying the documentation as sent to Laconia ant the towns of Belknap County, it would be impossible for someone unfamiliar with the process to actually find and pinpoint the increases. If people can’t find or see a real increase, perhaps they won’t question it, right? How could they?
After first attempting to take some 14% more tax dollars to fund the county, through various sleights of hand using smoke and mirrors in “finding” revenues, the county’s leaders, without reducing the budget by a single red-cent, “saved” the taxpayers a little more, and would “only” take some 10% above last year’s haul. This magical budgeting continued Tuesday night at the county convention’s public hearing on the supplemental appropriation, where they “found” more things that would be paid for by the state of New Hampshire. This supposedly now means that they, again without actually making any spending reductions whatsoever, will “only” take 6.6% more from us than last year.
Isn’t this wonderful news? Belknap County is going to get “free” money from the state that everybody knows has NO money, while the politicians, taking more property tax dollars than ever before, claim they are doing their job and “saving” money. Don’t forget to “thank” them next time you see them…
The County Convention is slated to act on this Tuesday evening. There is more to this that I will post in a bit. Stay Tuned (for those of you that care, anyway)…