Coda: Jenny and The Debts
Jennifer Roberts announced this week that she won’t seek another term on the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners, which she joined in 2004 and has held sway over as chairman for the last four years, a tenure that has spanned massive government growth and outrageous spending tempered only by a recent and far too late semblance of fiscal sanity.
Along the way, Roberts has enabled gross failings and, in some cases, outright crimes committed by government bureaucrats all too willing to scam the system at the taxpayers’ expense (see DSS, Giving Tree, ABC Board, CIAA ticket-gate, Mecklenburg Open Door, et. al.), promising transparency and accountability while delivering very little of either.
At every turn, when Roberts had chances to make responsible decisions to both benefit the taxpayer and also shelter the county from fiscal calamity, she chose instead to champion spending sprees for a county government that burned through money faster than a pyromaniac on crack, until a full-fledged recession finally doused the flame.
Roberts dipped her toe in the tax-and-spend wading pool early, when she supported a nearly 11 percent tax hike back in 2005, part and parcel of a $1.25 billion budget, an increase of 8.8 percent from the previous year.
The spending juggernaut rolled into 2006, when the budget grew to $1.33 billion and included a marginal 1.79-cent tax cut, enabled by the liberal board majority’s egregious decision to raid the county’s paygo fund to the tune of $18 million, exacerbating the county’s growing debt problem. The extra money was used, in large part, to provide about $11 million in salary adjustments and raises for county employees, and to pay for myriad social programs and services geared toward securing votes for Roberts and her Democrat cohorts.
The following year, with Roberts at the helm, the county’s budget ballooned to $1.45 billion on the back of a 1.98-cent tax hike, while Roberts helped lead the cheerleading for a massive and misguided $516 million school bond that voters were suckered into approving at the polls, piling up additional mountains of debt that would contribute to a landslide down the road.
And Roberts was just getting started. In 2008, against the recommendation of county budget staff and as bond rating agencies warned of Mecklenburg’s mounting spending crisis, Roberts led the charge to raise the county’s debt ceiling, jumping the per-capita debt from $3,600 to $4,200 and inflating the percent of the county’s operating budget spent on debt service from 16 to 22 percent.
At the same time, the board approved another record-setting budget that rolled in at $1.5 billion and included a 2-cent tax hike for the county’s unincorporated area and a fat 2.7-percent increase in total county payroll, which had swelled to 5,157 full-time employees, up from the 4,800 or so when Roberts first climbed on the board.
Drunk on a boom-time mentality and blind to trouble around the bend, Roberts stayed busy shaking her pom-poms for a $250 million parks and recreation bond.
Notice any trends here? Steadily ballooning budgets? Check. Recidivist tax hikes? Check. Rapid expansions of both the size and cost of government? Check.
It was time for another check – reality, which began to hit with enough impact to taint even the most rose-colored of glasses. That Roberts and her gang of habitual tax-and-spenders didn’t see it coming, despite repeated red flags, is disgraceful; that they could have taken steps to help avoid it, tragic.
The following year saw the county slip under the weight of massive debt coupled with slumping revenues, trimming its budget to $1.42 billion and going on a so-called “debt diet,” similar to a grossly obese overeater being forced to cut calories when he suddenly discovers the cupboard ransacked bare by his own hands. Commissioners deferred the sale of $253 million in bonds, scaled back programs and services, trimmed its workforce by about 200 positions, dropped merit pay increases and suspended county matches to employee retirement plans.
And the board’s liberal Democrat majority, led by Roberts, had no one but themselves to blame.
“The situation we are in is not the result of an unlucky calamity caused by circumstances beyond our control,” Commissioner Neil Cooksey said at the time. “In a real sense, it is the result predicted by many … of the conscious decision of the majority of this board in recent years to spend as much money as possible on as many things as possible.”
The calamity continued last year, as commissioners pulled the trigger on mid-year budget cuts, followed by another round of employee layoffs, library shutterings, and more reductions in county services and programs – the bill for wild spending and massive debt accumulation over previous years, when liberal Democrats belted out the theme song of Jenny & The Debts and abused a platinum-plated credit card worse than any housewife with a bad shopping jones.
As Commissioner Karen Bentley noted at the time, over the previous six years inflation had ticked up by less than 14 percent, while county spending had skyrocketed by 39 percent.
This year, Roberts put what apparently will be her final brand on the county’s fiscal hide, leading the board of commissioners Democrat majority to approve a marginal tax cut that in reality, thanks to the magic of revaluation, increased the property tax burden on nearly 60 percent of homeowners while growing government by upwards of $70 million.
Taxpayers should cheer Roberts’s decision to exit the county board stage left, not because she’s a bad person with inherently evil intent (she’s actually a very nice lady, willing to graciously engage constituents from both sides of the political aisle); but because Mecklenburg simply can no longer afford her aggressively liberal policies and tax-and-spend practices.
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