Chapel Hill’s First Budget Meeting of 2010
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010I want to quickly respond to Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt’s comments this evening.
First, spending $8-12M on the Lot #5 project, building luxury condos and enriching a private developer, is not the same as “protecting our Town’s infrastructure”.
The Lot #5 (West 140) project is discretionary – the push to keep it going is not based on sound economic fundamentals.
Putting Lot #5 on par with filling potholes or expanding the Library is a great political speaking point – but certainly not grounded in reality – suggestions otherwise does the public a disservice.
At the same time, other probable debt-related outlays aren’t included in the analysis. Mark suggesting the lump of general obligation (G.O.) debt covers the whole gamut of obligations minimizes the challenge before us.
Beyond that bit of misdirection, Mark knows (or should know) that our Town’s current reserves are low compared to historical reserves on a percentage basis.
That $1.9M increase Mark bandied about sounds big but isn’t considering the $55M hole we’re in. No matter how hard fought the battle to get that $1.9M last year, weighed against future operational and capital demands – like trying to expand the Library – the percentage improvement in overall reserves was slightly better than negligible and doesn’t position us any better to deal with MAJOR outlays (if you use a more reasonable debt ceiling).
To use the credit card example several Council members relied on this evening, there is a qualitative difference between the following two scenarios:
(more…)
