Feb 2, 2008 9:18 am US/Eastern
Property Tax Relief Or A Cut In Public Services
MIAMI SPRINGS (CBS4) ―
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Playground In Miami Springs
CBS
Public officials, employee unions and others were against property-tax relief Amendment One, fearing it would exacerbate inequities in Florida's tax system and reduce vital public services including schools, fire protection, law enforcement.
"Teachers police and firefighters should be the last to see a cut. But then I don't know what's left: parks and recreation?" questioned David Vargas of Miami Springs.
Vargas last Tuesday voted against property tax-cut Amendment One, because he believed his property tax savings would not be worth the losses to his community.
"You don't want to see your kids without a place to go. Or if it is a place to go, it's just not barely kept up because there's no maintenance. It's a tough call," he said.
From the very young to the elderly, if there are cuts in services, it would be a difficult call. Departments like the Miami Springs Senior Center says it only has one employee and the rest are volunteers.
Cutting back there would mean losing a place where Helen Wells has grown to love.
"It means a lot to me, because most everyone here seems like a close friend," she said.
From the senior center to recreation, the Miami Springs city manager has difficult decisions to make.
"Those would be the ones that you'd have to start looking at because they're not generating revenue," said City Manager Jim Borgmann.
He added, "What we did is we sat down one day and started going through all of the different types of areas that we could think of within the city, all the different places where we could effectively cut costs."
It includes the possibility of cutting salaries, benefits, create a hiring freeze, contract out labor and close city offices three days a week instead of two.
Borgmann added, it's almost "like making Miami Springs perhaps a part-time city."
Critics argue local government has received an 85 percent raise over the last five years due to the real estate boom. Amendment One grabs just five percent of that back.
Referring to the surplus, the city manager mentioned $500,000 dollars a year went "to cover the debts and the losses of the golf course".
Miami Springs expects to finalize its budget in April, and that's when it will learn where the burden of the cutbacks will fall.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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