Dear Editor,
I refer to your report that the Georgetown City Council is operating on a $2 billion deficit, and to eliminate this deficit, the council needs to raise more taxes from various avenues.
No matter how much money you put in the council’s hands, the city will still be badly run. The city needs to put its own house in order by doing the following:
(i) The Council must collect the hundreds of millions of outstanding taxes it is owed. It is very slack in this regard. How could you ask for more money from the citizens when you are not collecting the money that is owed to you?
(ii) The municipality is badly overstaffed – about 80% of the revenues is spent on the payment of staff. In normal business the percentages spent on staff is 12% or 13%. This absurd situation has to be corrected.
(iii) The council has to cut out the widespread graft and corruption.
(iv) The governance of the city has fallen apart and there is no direction. The Mayor seems to go one way, the Town Clerk another, the City Engineer still another, and no one knows where the City Treasurer is.
(v) There is no financial management of the city. This has to be restored before any thought should be given to allowing the city council to raise new taxes.
To solve the city’s financial and other problems, the Mayor and City Council must put its own house in order, and when it has done so a little bit of creative management would do the trick. But nothing could be done unless the Mayor and City Council begin to clean up the mess in their own house.
Yours faithfully,
R Williams