Well it’s that time of year again when small town politics call for elections that they hope will have low attendance – low attendance from the opponents. So what do we have on our plates this time? School board, city council, bond elections ... Yes, here we go again … more bonds.
The city of Kyle wants taxpayers to vote to have their city taxes raised 43 percent so five new roads can be overhauled, mostly east of IH-35. They hope the taxpayers of Kyle will cosign a $36 million loan. We who oppose it are fed up. Time to dig in our heels and say, NO NEW TAXES! There are good reasons for these feelings:
• What happened to the millions of dollars in building permits and utility fees the city collected after the developers built the roads, sewers, power lines, water lines? Why weren’t those monies spent for what was obviously going to be a problem – the roads feeding those subdivisions?
• The city of Kyle incurred massive debt counting on these building permits being issued ad infinitum when the ordinary citizen saw a housing collapse on the near horizon. Current debt $68 million.
• Waste: The city of Kyle had a real nice city maintenance building done with a rocked-in rainwater collection tank which is estimated to have cost $15 K extra. They use the water for landscaping. Wasn’t city water available for a city building? How long will it take for that tank to pay for itself? Unnecessary feel-good fluff. At the Five Mile Dam soccer park, the county built a $50 K (at least) wind generator which hasn’t turned in a year. Workers I spoke to say it can’t be fixed.
• The school district is ONE- HALF BILLION dollars in debt.
• The Kyle EMS and fire department building is a $4 million glass, brick and stone mansion. They became a taxing entity a few years ago and look how they spent the taxpayers money. No one in Kyle is happy about that building.
• Every time the report is published Kyle has a 10 percent increase in sales tax revenue. Where is that money going? Use that future income to cosign the new road costs.
The amount of fluff and waste overwhelms us taxpayers. Now the City of Kyle wants us to build new roads for those people who moved out there by choice, knowing the roads were bad when they went there, like moving under an airport landing path and complaining about the noise. And they give that old worn out reason that it’s bad for fire trucks and EMS response time. It’s dangerous for school buses … IT’S FOR THE CHILDREN! ... like the proponents of school bonds say. Well we say tough toenails. I told one city councilman that I would be willing to consider support for the bond issue if they could show me a schedule of when the roads would be paid for and then the taxes dropped to the pre bond rate. He snickered like I was from another planet.
Show me a plan where growth pays for itself. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for. And stop wasting. Vote NO on new taxes.
Ray Wolbrecht has been a dentist in Kyle for many years and was instrumental in a fight to keep Austin Community College from building in north Hays County.
