No New Taxes By Rodney Dial December 14, 2013
The next Ketchikan City Council meeting is on December 19th at 7 pm. If you do not have the commitment to speak out and let the Assembly know our taxes are high enough… you deserve the reduced standard of living you will face as a result. It is the duty of every hard working citizen to speak out now for the future of our community. The following is the testimony I gave at the last City Assembly meeting on December 11th, fighting for this community, asking that they not raise our taxes again. Keep in mind they are my notes so the readability is not as polished as a letter. Dial testimony, December 11th, City Assembly Budge Meeting… I am here tonight to ask you to not raise property taxes… again. I’m also going to ask that you not raise our water rates, sewer rates and electrical rates… again. Or raise our sales taxes. I read the November 16th article in the Ketchikan paper regarding Karl Amylon’s request for more taxes and it comes across as nothing more than scare tactics and political cover for the assembly to heap yet again.. more increases on the citizens of this community. The interesting thing about this article is it contains no new or creative ideas for savings… just scare tactic cuts to maintain the status quo. Anyone willing to think outside the box can quickly come up with ways to save. For example: We currently have two museums’ open during the winter… Totem Heritage Center and Tongass Historical Museum. I didn’t even know about the Totem Heritage Center until I started looking into the budget and I’ve been here a long time… my question to you… how many people paid to visit either of these museums today, or will this winter. That we maintain these facilities open year around is absurd. If both were closed in the winter, and the admission fee was raised to $5 in the summer, we could save significant funds and the public wouldn’t even notice the difference. How about reducing the number of crossing guards we employ in the summer? Why is it that every major tourist destination in this country can do without crossing guards, utilizing walk/don’t walk signs, be we have to have a small army of workers with stop signs. Isn’t this why the city council spent 100 thousand dollars on a pedestrian way finding study… to learn how to construct barriers so people would use crosswalks? How about asking the fire department to not drive a 350 thousand dollar fire truck to medical calls. One of the reasons you have considered replacing it for the last few years is because it is driven to non-fire calls and has an extremely high operating cost. There is no need to drive expensive fire truck to medical calls. They can put their equipment in a more cost effective vehicle for transport and extend the useful life of a very expensive vehicle. End funding of the legislative party in Juneau. No more smoked brie, shrimp, and free alcohol for the city of Juneau. Other SE towns do just fine on their capital budgets without throwing a party each year at taxpayer expense. Reduce funding to the non-profits and Community agencies. You have allowed groups to come before you for years and make wild claims about all the good they do and not require a shred of proof, performance measures, audits or cost benefit analysis. The community agencies that can fund themselves need to do so. Why does no-one have the courage to ask Ketchikan Arts and First City players how much they would have to raise their ticket prices to offset tax payer funding. With all the plays, events such as the wearable arts festifial … what maybe a dollar. They can’t ask their users for an extra dollar, but you will raise the taxes of your citizens again to pay for their special interests? Do you remind them of the tens of thousands of in kind donations they get each year from the tax payers … for their tax exempt status… zero property tax. How much yearly revenue was lost when the Fireside building left private hands and went to First City Players Why can’t some of the community agencies be expected to focus more on fundraising? There are plenty of ways to cut the budget and ask individual departments to find savings. If your city manager is telling you there is no fat that can be cut from the government, you need to find a new city manager. What was very troubling in the newspaper article was the statement “The city has to pay debt service towards a number of bonds and staring in 2014 that debt service also will include payments for the Medical Center Expansion.” The voters were clearly told… my many supporters… that the KGH expansion would be paid for with the existing hospital sales tax. If this turns out to be a lie… and the public was deceived into thinking this could be funded with existing revenue… … there are going to be a lot of very upset people. When you wonder why you don’t have the reserves you wish you had at this point let’s consider some of the Wasteful spending the city has done over the last few years. 100 thousand employee wage survey 100 thousand pedestrian way finding survey 1.2 million for library plans never used. 50 thousand yearly increase in the operating budget due to the new library building being built and continued operation of the centennial building Break room renovations – City hall renovation the voters would have said no. 11 thousand to install automatic flushers on city toilets. Hundreds of thousands for various art projects Over Five million to community agencies since 2006, with non-essential community funding around $300 per year, per household now. Thousands per year for the annual legislative party in Juneau 7 thousand dollar assessment for Harborview Park 7 thousand dollars to Ketchikan Arts to solicit bids for a rain gauge Just so you know the taxpayers feel that our current rain gauge is sufficient. How long do you think that thing would have remained operational on the dock until some drunk climbed on it and broke it, or some juvenile with a pellet gun shot a hole in it. What budget was going to fund the operating costs for maintenance and electricity? Just another example of nickel and diming the budget to death. We are not buying the justification that some of the items I mentioned are paid with cruise ship passenger funds. As we know…that money can be used to offset other tourist related spending from the general fund. They are examples of waste. How much tax revenue have you lost by building a fire station on the most valuable piece of property in the city?.... 20-30 thousand per year… forever? How much are we losing each year with all the non-profits that have tax exempt property down town? How much sales tax revenue will the City lose when Oceans Alaska becomes a tourist destination taking thousands of tourists out of the city area for good portions of their stay? Do you consider that you are supporting an endeavor that will reduce revenues to city coffers? Let’s talk about what has happened over the last few years with spending…Everything I am about to say comes from the KDN 2006 Property tax assessments increased between 10 to 25 percent. In Ketchikan, a proposed half cent sales tax increase to renovate White Cliff failed 2-to-1. Great example of what the VOTERS think about raising taxes to fund the non-profits. 2007 City and KPU Budgets total $101.4 million and include a 15 percent increase in water utility rates. $7,210 contract for assessment of Harborview Park and $8,150 contract with PND for a conceptual design of a dock near Harborview Park. 100 k to study employee wages the Council awarded $767,964 in grants to 17 nonprofit groups. Ketchikan City Council approved a plan to solicit $150,000 worth of public art proposals. A 2007 Editorial reads…. Ketchikan Gateway Borough property tax assessments are going up again this year, with many residential assessments increasing up to 15 percent and commercial, land and condominiums going from 20 to 35 percent. Clover Bay, Moser Pass and Loring areas will receive land adjustments up to 20 percent. But it's also a big difference based on wages. It's more than a half-day's work -- before taxes -- at the $15-an-hour salary of an entry-level boatwright. For a bakery sales clerk making $7.25 an hour, that represents 12 hours' work, before taxes are taken out. So that clerk will have to work more than a day and a half to pay the difference. It's a big difference, and it's a difference that just keeps on coming. A scan of some tax records indicates that a single-family home on the North End, without improvements and not on the water, has gone up in value by nearly 68 percent since the assessment in 2002 to 2007. 68%!! Do you think the citizens had a 68% pay increase between 2002-2007? The editorial goes on to say “we can't afford to chase all the working people out of Ketchikan and leave it to rich folks from Down South looking for the next new location to take over. One way people get chased out is when taxes are too high for the people who have lived here to keep living here. At some point, our leaders have to draw a line. Some people getting tax bills won't line up at the lectern Monday evening to beg the Assembly not to make the tax increase worse by keeping the mill rate the same. Some of them will be working at their second or third job when the Assembly meeting begins at 5:30 p.m. Others will be too tired from having already put in 12 hours by then, with the need to make dinner and hear about the kids' day taking priority. Still others will be too discouraged to attend. They feel unheard and invisible. Borough and school district officials must figure out how to give children the best public-school education possible with the money available, without declaring more money "available" by raising taxes yet again. Those are the words of the editorial in the paper, June 9th, 2007…. Since that editorial we have had two property tax increases and many, many water, sewer, electricity, garbage and assessment rate increases since then. Our property taxes were the highest in SE Alaska back then… and are now more than double places like Sitka. Why do you have such contempt for the business trying to compete regionally with the other communities in SE Alaska for the tourist dollar? 2009 KDN Article… City Council on Thursday will consider keeping the city’s property tax rate at 6.1 mills, the level on which the city’s 2009 budget was based. However, because property assessments announced in May were higher than the city anticipated when the budget was approved in December, 6.1 mills would bring about $177,000 more than budgeted Increased electric rates 2.1 percent; increased the sales tax cap to $2,000 2011 City budget calls for spending $107,479,162, which is $10 million more than 2010. And of course for the last two years… two property tax increases and more utility increases. We just learned a few weeks ago that property assessments are going up by another 5.6% This means that since 2002 (11 years) assessments have increased by nearly 100% on the average home. Inflation has increased during the same time by just under 30%, meaning that in real dollars we are paying a significantly higher amount of our disposable income in local government taxes… and that was before the two past property tax increases. That increase also gets passed on through every good and service locals purchase on this island. All of these tax and utility increases really point to a serious disconnect between local government officials… many of whom live quite comfortably, and some of which advocate for higher sales and property taxes while claiming senior citizen exemptions…they have no skin in the game. City Manager Karl Amalyon , the constant and yearly advocate for ever increasing spending and more taxes has received more in just salary increases since 2005 than the average young person makes in an entire year working in our local tourist related low wage job. How can he be expected to understand how difficult it is for our young people to simply afford rent when his raises are more than what they make in a year? There have been years when his bonus is ½ what some of them make in a year. A Complete disconnect with the citizens you serve. Even if you do not raise taxes or utility rates… citizens will soon be hit with an assessment increase nearly three times the rate of inflation. Rent will cost more, food fuel will cost more. Now our young people are also expected to pay more for their health insurance to subsidize older, less healthy people. We will give our youth that great education people like Mr. Olsen and Ms. West advocate for, but then wave good bye to them when they leave Ketchikan because they can’t afford to live here. The tax payers demand more consideration then the groups that come before you with their hands out asking for more tax money year after year. It’s not a matter of if you will have to cut… only when you realize you must do so. You can ignore the reality that your citizens cannot afford more increases, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. If it takes a citizen initiative to hold the line on spending and taxing, because you don’t have the courage to make the hard choices… then that is where we are heading. No new tax increases. Thank you. Rodney Dial
Received December 12, 2013 - Published December 14, 2013
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