The mail-in electoral season is now.  Ballots will hit mailboxes shortly and the voting will commence.  As a conservative Republican, I must apologize for our local Republican leaders who put tax and debt increases on our local ballots for voter approval.

For example, I’m not sure what they were thinking over at the C-1 school district.  Campaign material, and rhetoric from a couple board members, says that overwhelming love for children drives them to support the 3B tax for a bond debt.  But it’s going to cost over a million dollars in interest for this 3B deal!  Can love make you sign a bad deal?  Not only will C-1 taxpayers have to buy all the stuff at top dollar contemplated by the 3B ballot measure, but the money they’ll get from the Colorado BEST grant program won’t even cover the cost to finance the bond.

Apparently C-1 doesn’t have enough money to service/repair/replace necessary infrastructure in the C-1 district, at least not at the level the current directors would like.  But with over a million in financing costs alone, this seems like a pretty expensive way to get things done.  It’s a good thing taxpayers will be on the hook to make up the deficits because I’m sure the directors don’t have the money.  They just have love.

And then over at Elbert County, it recently took a good six hours for all of the department heads to parade before the BOCC and lay out how cash starved each of their departments is, and describe some of the things they could do for us if only they had more revenue to spend.

So impressed were our Republican BOCC members with the department head tales of budget deprivation and public service in potency, that they put two perpetual tax measures on the ballot for our approval.  These taxes will just feed the general revenue fund, allowing the county to direct spending wherever they want, and not have to identify spending objects up front.

That’s a pretty sweet deal!  In personal terms, it would be like someone saying, “Give me an endless stream of money for something I might do in the future, and I’ll let you know what that is when I make up my mind.”

Elbert County hasn’t even published its 2012 actual financial performance yet.  How do county leaders even know if they don’t have enough money to keep things going?

More importantly, when you look at the past decade of financial performance for the county, there’s a disturbing feature in the numbers — spending always meets or exceeds revenues.  There is never too much revenue!  No matter how much revenue goes up in a given year, spending always goes up by at least a comparable amount.

Republicans have a reputation for valuing smaller governments that do less for citizens, thereby making room in society for the private sector to do more, thereby increasing profit opportunities to enlarge private economic activity, and thereby generating new wealth for the society.

Democrats have the opposite reputation of valuing public non-profit spending for the collective good, which they don’t hesitate to define, which generally doesn’t work out too well for anyone they don’t like, which generally doesn’t include wealth-generating private enterprise, except for some enterprises owned by people they like.

So, when I see Republicans acting like government-growing Democrats, all I can do is offer my apologies.  I wish they wouldn’t do things like that.

And until our Republican BOCC repeals the oppressive zoning that keeps any significant economic activity and jobs from taking root in Elbert County, I wouldn’t reward them with any more money.

B_Imperial