Guest Editorial: Only it ISN’T Monopoly money. It’s OUR money.

By Alan Bovi

Let’s say you’ve budgeted 10K of your savings to do some home projects. You get quotes, you’re within 5-10% of your budget and you proceed. Only the contractor you’ve selected now says that project is 30K. Or what if it’s a large house remodel budgeted and quoted at 100K…oops, the contractor now says it’s 300K. Hmm, do you proceed?

Common sense prevails and you pump the brakes. But if it’s a roundabout in Scottsdale, sure, why not, it’s only taxpayer money and we, the Council/Mayor, know better than you.

Let’s take it a step further. I used to be a sucker for these propositions that ‘save’, or ‘protect’ or ‘fund’ various buckets like parks, police, fire, schools, you name it. Prop 490 is a great example. Except for 1 vital detail I learned: all these things ARE fully funded, as they should be. But no, mayors and councils want to dig deeper into your wallets to give them a piggy bank to do whatever they might deem important (whether you want it or not) while we’re baited into thinking these community essentials will be compromised.

Every time you are tempted to vote Yes for the latest gimmicky Proposition-especially one that raises our taxes by $1.2BL- close your eyes, envision the countless large buildings that keep going up, robbing Scottsdale of every inch of real estate (bye, bye green spaces) and envision the mountain of cash that accompanies each of these projects in Net New city tax revenues.

Enough already. They have more than enough $$ to keep our city thriving without more taxes and special interest propositions. Let’s start with canceling unnecessary projects that come in at 2x/3x the cost of what’s reasonable, sensible and budgeted. (Message to City Leadership: Pretend you’re teaching your kids a lesson in finance, then operate in the same manner with city revenues/our tax dollars…)

Oh yes, one more thing: that’s why I’m voting Lisa Borowsky for Mayor and Adam Kwasman for City Council…I don’t have to explain my position regarding the above basic concepts because they already know, and will inject some common sense back into city fiscal leadership. Then we can TRULY and responsibly ‘save, protect and fund’ Scottsdale…