“Happy Days Are Here Again!” That popular old ditty has become the motto of local municipalities preparing budgets for the upcoming year. After seven long years of austerity, the money has begun to pour in again. Suddenly, projects put on the back burner for the better part of a decade are back in vogue. Positions are being added, not eliminated. And spending plans are beginning to creep back up after years of merciless cutting.
You can’t blame them, really. Local governments asked their staff to do with less for so long. Wellington, for instance, managed to shrink its budget from a high of $109 million in 2008 to a low of $73.9 million in 2012. Now, however, it has begun to creep up again. Wellington’s 2015 budget is proposed to squeeze in just below the $80 million mark.
Much of this extra money is due to a return of the traditional revenue sources. State funding, which had all but dried up a few years ago, has begun to flow again. Meanwhile, property values have soared. While still below pre-crash levels, this year’s hike nears double digits — and breaks double digits in the case of Loxahatchee Groves.
Loxahatchee Groves, which as of last year was still saddled with falling property values, saw its total valuation climb 11.28 percent to $199 million, according to the preliminary tax roll released last week by the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser’s Office. Wellington followed close behind with a 9.97 percent hike in value to $6.31 billion (still well below the 2008 high of $7.8 billion). Royal Palm Beach also had good news, with a valuation climb of 9.46 percent to $2.05 billion.
While the budgets are going up, it is not surprising that the elected officials threw a little rain on the parade this week, reminding gleeful budgeters that just because the money is there, doesn’t mean that it needs to be collected and spent by government. In Royal Palm Beach, Councilman Fred Pinto challenged village staff and his fellow elected officials to consider a tax rate decrease, as had always been the goal in RPB before the freefall in property values made it impossible. Meanwhile, in Wellington, the entire council had concerns with how a new $100 drainage assessment hike would be collected and spent.
In both these cases, it is true that after years of neglect, more money should be spent on maintenance and long-delayed projects. However, these increases need to be fully vetted not through the lens of the boom years, but through the years of hardship that we have just lived through. Some of the extra expenditures are necessary, but are they all? Everything must be justified.
