Siphoning Citizens’ Hard Earned Income for Bigger Government, Can We Really Afford Tom Henry as Mayor?

For many years Fort Wayne, like many other American cities, was provided basic services that were paid for out of the general fund. This fund was generated by property taxes. These basics like police protection, fire protection, leaf pick up, also included free garbage and trash pick up. They even picked up your Christmas tree at the curb. That all changed in 1992.
The newly elected Fort Wayne City Council found a unique way of increasing property tax without calling it a tax. Knowing that they couldn’t be voted out of office for at least four more years, they decided to extract the cost of garbage pick up and bill taxpayers for this service separately. City Utilities water and sewer billing would collect fees.

At that time an average priced house was selling for $65,000 to $85,000 with property taxes assessed at around $600 a year; this included both homestead and mortgage exemption. Those without the exemptions paid more. In 1992 the city was paying $3.5 million out of the general fund for garbage pick up. After debating the issue for several weeks, the City Council came up with the nice round figure of $5 per month for the garbage pick up fee, (it’s now close to $10). That of course meant that the taxpayers should have received a $3.5 million reduction in their property tax bill. That didn’t happen.

The city council, with Tom Henry representing the 3rd district, not only begins charging homeowners $5 a month, they left the $3.5 million in the general fund as a slush fund for special projects. That fund over the last 15 years has collected over $52 million in taxes.

Based on the average home price in 1992, the average homeowner paid around $600 a year and property tax. With the new garbage picked up fee at $5 a month, which meant they were paying $60 a year more for services that previously was paid for out of the general fund. Because there was no refund on the annual $3.5 million taxes collected for garbage picked up, that equaled a 10% increase in property tax, the largest tax increase in Fort Wayne history. They didn’t slide it by everyone; several citizens were very outspoken on this obvious sham being perpetrated on Fort Wayne taxpayers.

Taxpayers have a long memory. Several of those City Council members were voted out of office. Tom Henry is a reluctant candidate, dragooned into running by the Party chairman after he dragged both Tom and Jerry Henry into a room and told them, “One of you two is going to run for Mayor.” Jerry couldn’t get out of the room fast enough, and Tom was left holding the bag. Is Tom Henry going to bring with him the same flimflam shell games that he supported when he was on the City Council? Plan on it. You know what they say; you can’t teach an old dog, new tricks.

If you find this article informative? Consider donating any amount you choose.

No related posts.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.