Truth Is Missing!

                                                                                                                                                By Ron West

 

                Have you received your NRH Newsletter?

 

                If you haven’t looked at it yet, you are missing out seeing one of the most blatant abuses of city power in our history.  Apparently, when anyone tries to limit future tax increases on anyone on this city, the city staff and the majority on the council become very irate.  Irate to the point of publishing actual misinformation.

 

                Our Mayor recently told everyone listening in a City Council Meeting to look to the city for factual information.  He should have been selling his beachfront property in Arizona at the same time.

 

                Propaganda takes many forms.  Carefully written columns can take some elements of truth and weave them into a pattern that yields something far from the truth.  Threaded through the lead article in the Fall Newsletter of the city is the “threat of reductions in critical city services”,  “threats of impending doom related to the baby boomers getting old”,  “massive losses of revenue to the city” and an implication that an insignificant number of voters in NRH voted for the Constitutional Amendment that allows the vote on the freeze.  It also implies class warfare by suggesting that seniors are getting an unfair break already. 

 

                Omissions are glaring also.  They don’t tell you that 85% of the voters approved the Constitutional Amendment.  They don’t tell you that the Seniors and Disabled will continue to pay property taxes on their property after the freeze is enacted.  They call the loss in future tax increases a “cost” to deceive you.  Please note that they do not talk about the “cost” of the current homestead exemption that all of us now enjoy.  (One of their considerations in June was to discontinue the senior exemption and ignore the freeze.)

 

The article leads you to believe that the decision to have an election was made after the

public hearing but in reality, the only reason this is even being voted on is the result of the election in May.  Prior to May, the City Council would not even put the Senior Freeze on the Agenda for any discussion.  (They were waiting for resolution to school financing?)  They had numerous request for such an item on the agenda beginning early in 2004.

 

                I think the thing that takes the cake is the four page supplement that is basically filled with propaganda, misinformation and outright lies.

 

                Consider that “future tax increases on the seniors and disabled” are called “costs” if denied.  Consider that the current $36,000 exemption for seniors is calculated and shown as a “cost of adopting the freeze” in the amount of $605,000 – increasing each year.  The real first year denial of taxes (cost) is $0.   Quite a difference isn’t it.   The problem with this lie is that the exemption is currently in place and is not affected one way or the other by the freeze.  The numbers are presented simply to show costs that do not exist.

 

                There are more deceptions in the write up on TIF#2 but I will reserve that for a future article dealing with this possibly illegal TIF.  In one case the city – in the newsletter – overstates actual TIF tax revenues by nearly 10 times!

 

                If there is a bottom line to this article it would be to ask that you read carefully anything published by the city and not necessarily take their information as fact.  Like I said above, when you try to take future tax increases away from the old members of this spendthrift council, they make up their own rules to play by.