Bad decisions lead to Johnson tax request

Now we learn that while nearly every other government agency in the USA is frantically cutting expenses to balance budgets, we are increasing them. Johnson County Supervisors voted to increase our property tax askings by 0.5 percent for fiscal year 2012.

One of the reasons mentioned for the increase is an “additional $500,000 to the Secondary Roads budget to help cover increasing maintenance costs.” I guess that it never struck these supervisors that they

could have spent the

$1.8 million that FEMA gave them last fall to pay for these “increased maintenance costs.”

Last April, when the supervisors were about to vote on the use of this $1.8 million to raise the wreckage of the Sutliff bridge from its watery grave as a monument to Rod Sullivan, I wrote local newspapers stating that “there is an opportunity for the county to obtain $1.8 million from FEMA for a choice of many different projects and three supervisors have chosen to spend that money, not as part of the $5 million required for updating the Mahaffey Bridge, not on widening the 120th Street to Shueyville, ... but rather on pulling the remains of the Sutliff Bridge out of the Cedar River ... ” My appeal was ignored.

Now, we are paying for their absent-minded decision. I hope taxpayers will remember these three supervisors, Sullivan, Janelle Rettig and Terrence Neuzil, at next election time.

Henry T. Madden

Iowa City