The Cobb budget crisis will soon be addressed in serious detail by the Cobb Board of Commissioners, which is holding a budget retreat on Tuesday.
The week after that, next Monday, June 18 to be exact, at the East Cobb Senior Center, budget town halls will start around the county. There will be another one in our community, on July 9, at the Sewell Mill Library and Cultural Center.
UPDATE: Cobb chairman proposes revised budget, keeping parks and libraries open
Cobb County government is facing a $30 million budget deficit for fiscal year 2019. We have known this and been told this for months.
That’s as big a deficit as the county faced during the worst of the recession.
Yet only a small handful of “options” for addressing this gap, submitted by a few department heads, have been made public.
They’re the departments that tend to get people’s emotions riled up: senior services, libraries and, this past week, parks, pools and recreation centers.
Here we go again.
Like the proposed library cuts, the cuts on parks and rec “draft list,” if enacted, would absolutely crush the provision of popular services.
Like the proposed library cuts, closing all of the parks and rec facilities on that list wouldn’t do much to close the deficit.
In East Cobb, the “draft list” includes Fullers Park and the Fullers Recreation Center, the Mountain View Aquatic Center, The Art Place and the Mountain View Community Center.
A little more than $3 million, to be exact, is what the parks and rec savings would add up to countywide. The library cuts would amount to less than that, roughly $2.9 million.
Along with new membership fees and increases for classes and rentals at senior centers, the possible elimination of the UGA Cobb Extension Service and shutting down Keep Cobb Beautiful (also on the parks and rec list), that still doesn’t equal what the county spends every year to pay off its obligations for SunTrust Park and other costs for Atlanta Braves games and events there.
As I wrote back in February: SunTrust is untouchable, having been placed on the “must” list of budget items that are required to be appropriated by commissioners every year.
Parks, libraries and senior services are not. They’re merely on the “desired” list.
Yet the cost of delivering services has grown the most in public safety, transportation, courts, community development and water and sewer.
Library hours have not been added back to their pre-Recession totals. Cobb’s unwillingness to have Sunday library hours anywhere except the Switzer branch, but only during the school year, is ridiculous.
The library system’s budget details were laid out in painful detail months ago. Employees in these endangered departments know their jobs may be eliminated.
Related stories
- Cobb budget town hall schedule
- Foxtrotters Dance Club disbanding after 21 years
- Ott: East Cobb Library ‘isn’t going to close’
Why are these low-cost, high-impact services, which add exponentially to our qualify of life, vulnerable to being gutted with a record tax digest predicted for 2018?
Citizens skeptical of paying higher property taxes think it’s a ploy by Cobb Commission Chairman Mike Boyce to get a millage rate increase. He wants to add 1.1 mills to your property tax bill, which would just about cover the $30 million.
Getting you stoked up over the possibility of losing your library, or park, is an old tactic. His predecessor, Tim Lee, did the same thing. It worked during the Recession, when tax rates went up.
The county released a “Cobb budget journey” explainer this past week with information to bolster the argument that our current general fund millage rate is just about tapped out.
We’re paying a lower millage rate now than in 1990, despite the Cobb population having grown from 450,000 then to around 750,000 now. The tax hike imposed during the Recession was brought down a couple years ago, foolishly, by Lee, with a millage rate reduction right before losing his runoff with Boyce, and just as SunTrust became fully operational.
That vote only added to the budget jam that exists now.
I’m not wild about a tax increase either, and many homeowners are already paying higher tax bills because their assessments have gone up, some dramatically.
Instead of grazing around the edges, threatening to close parks and libraries and the Cobb Safety Village and whatnot, it’s time to tackle the truly big-ticket items. There’s got to be an honest conversation about what it really costs to properly serve a fast-growing county with basic, local government services.
Cobb is no longer the sleepy bedroom community it was when our family moved here in the mid-1960s. Many who simply wanted a quiet refuge in a ranch house on a wooded lot (some built by my father, a now-retired home contractor) are finding the density, traffic, noise and increasingly urban feel to Cobb, and even East Cobb, alarming.
So do I. That’s why a visit to a park, or a library has become something much more than a treat. For me, it’s almost essential to do this, at least once a week, or when I can.
But the truth is we require more public safety services, more court services, more transportation services, more zoning services, more water and sewer services. The current millage rate, even what Boyce has proposed, likely will not cover all of what’s required in a few years. Even if he gets his wish, it may not be enough.
Some question the wisdom of spending millions on future park land and opening new facilities built with SPLOST money, but that operate with county budget funds.
Those are valid issues, as is the subject of SPLOST reform. These topics are likely to be hashed out during the hot summer budget months ahead. They have to be part of an eventual effort to get ahead of budget issues.
In order for that to happen, Cobb leaders have to offer something of a vision for the county that hasn’t been forthcoming for years, even before the recession.
I’m admittedly a bleeding heart for parks and libraries, but scapegoating the services that Cobb has nickeled-and-dimed for decades, and playing a game of emotional blackmail with the public, isn’t the way to do that.
Get Our Free E-Mail Newsletter!
Every Sunday we round up the week’s top headlines and preview the upcoming week in the East Cobb News Digest. Click here to sign up, and you’re good to go!
