Budget Research
The budget in Vienna needs a can opener applied to it. We all need to be able to see a line by line dollar amount comparison for key items year to year for the last 10 years. With all of the residential assessment increases since 1997, where are the tax proceeds going? An astute six-grader can see that Vienna has crumbling roads and sidewalks and no plan to fix any of it in place. Where does the money go?
The election was no mandate. The election simply showed that if ALL you do in life is Vienna politics (i.e. Maud), after 50 years you will have a 1000 friends (and a little corruption too as evidenced by the Washington Post article). Vienna is more than 1000 people.
Comments
Indeed, Vienna IS more than 1000 people. According to Wikipedia, our population is 14,452.7. So the question is--who is this seven-tenths of a person?
Posted by: Pontific8tor | May 9, 2007 12:34 PM
That's a fact. The budget needs reviewed by someone other than the Mayor and Town Council. The Town Council and the Mayor are no match for the Town Manager who lulls them into fantasyland with his dazzle and confusion. The Town is run inefficiently. The cost to live in Vienna is higher than in Fairfax County and the cost to run every department is more per capita than any other jurisdiction. I'm not picking on the Police because they do a good job, but as an example, the cost of the Police Department is near 30 % of the entire budget but you can't find that in the budget because the costs are hidden under many places. Police protection costs more here than in other jurisdictions. And, don't be fooled by the low crime rate. That's because your neighbors don 't steal from you because they have more toys than you do anyway. And, the same is true for other departments. And, guess what, they gave the Town employees a big fat raise. We don't know how much anything costs because the Town won't tell us anything. The very people who re-elected the incumbents have been the hardest hit by the Town's spending frenzy for the last several years and they don't even realize that. Duh, it's the median value households that have been smacked the hardest by tax increases. When are the people in this Town going to figure out what's happening here?
Posted by: Unbelievable | May 12, 2007 01:32 PM