We told ya this year’s budget debate would get ugly. But the spectacle of Jim Black, Marc Basnight, and Mike Whatshisname sputtering at County Manager Harry Jones’ proposal to cut Mecklenburg’s tax rate by a penny is beautiful ugly.
It exposes the cynical money game that Raleigh is playing as well as the poisonous mindset of the Blacks and Basnights which assumes they control all local funding priorities by virtue of slinging some pork around. Or did you really think that that $45 million UNCC building for Uptown came with no strings attached? Forty-five million! And we can’t get a few million to end the catch-and-release program down at the court house. The Uptown crowd was supposed to be bought off by the shiny new building — it will have to be named for someone, maybe a statue out front — but evidently no one made the connection in these heady days of “ethics reform.”
Besides, Jones was supposed to take the $18 million from the Black-Basnight-Whatshisname lotto and say, “Thanks boss!” and go about his business. Instead, Jones looked at the millions in extra revenue lasts year’s county 10 percent property tax hike was throwing off and — this is important — the county’s own evidence that the property tax rate was too high and resolved to do something else. Jones took half of the $18 million and used it to retire school bond debt, freeing up money which could be spent or returned to taxpayers. Jones opted for the latter.
Presumably, had Jones poured the $9 million into, oh, various economic development sinkholes the Down East kleptocrats in Raleigh would’ve applauded. They are good at that. Instead we get this spittle from the cretinous oaf Basnight:
“We need to redistribute the funds going to Mecklenburg County. They have more than they need,” Basnight said.
South Carolina once had the system that Basnight, Black and their cronies evidently pine for — county budgets were drawn up in Columbia and state legislators walked the Earth like gods. That backward system was ended 30 years ago with the Home Rule Act.
Raleigh’s apparatchiks are not divine, not even decent. Their response to the first stirrings of fiscal responsibility in Mecklenburg is shameful, but might finally help drag the reeking carcass of state government into the disinfecting glare of sunlight.
Related: The Uptown paper of record’s own rebuke of the Raleigh gang also opines that a school bond the size of one voters rejected in November will require a tax hike. Sounds like an argument against another $427 million bond to me.
