Revenue Follows Growth, not Just Taxes; Is the Need for More Police Axiomatic?

Today’s editorial in The North County News appears to have been run through a spin machine. It’s as if the newspaper didn’t even listen to the Mayoral debates that they published on their own website. Had the NCN editors been paying attention, they would not have written what they did.

As a mayoral candidate, Mary Foster complained that she had just been handed a 2008 budget that called for a 5% tax increase, when the City is sitting on unprecedented surpluses. She made it very clear that if the budget vote had been held before the election, she would have recommended the same measure she did in 2006 – spending some of the surplus to get to no tax increase.

When viewed in the context of Foster’s well-documented campaign promises (you can hear her own words here, thanks to another blogger), the NCN editorial board’s missive is nothing more than partisan propaganda.

Speaking as partisans, the NCN editorial board derides Peekskill’s zero-percent tax increase as a political vendetta, and then says that budgets should be passed before the election. This is naïve. Had the budget vote been held before the election, Mary Foster would have voted for a zero percent tax increase, given everything she said during her campaign.

Even more naïve is the NCN’s contention that the budget didn’t collect “any additional revenue at all—not even the cost of inflation”. Listen to the debates, and Mary Foster says quite clearly that Peekskill will have an operating profit in 2008. If that isn’t additional revenue, then what is?

More to the point, the NCN fails to appreciate a basic economic fact: the City can raise, and has raised, additional revenue without raising taxes. We have been doing this for years through redevelopment. All Mayor-elect Foster and her team need do come January is allow Target and Lowe's to move to Lower South Street. Also, the Gateway Project can now move forward since it is no longer in the Democrats’ interest to exploit public housing residents as they have for the past year.

Another element of political spin in the NCN editorial is the implication that it is axiomatic that Peekskill needs more police officers. The Peekskill Police Department is at its highest deployment in history. Violent crime in Peekskill has been decreasing for years, but print newspapers, which use fear to drive sales, keep their focus on negative stories. It’s not surprising that the NCN would rely on prejudice and fear to lend credibility to their editorial.

We challenge the NCN to provide objective evidence as to why Peekskill needs more police than it has ever had in history. Don Bennett’s opinion, and the opinion of a bureaucrat looking to expand his domain, is far from objective. It should only cost five to ten thousand dollars to hire an expert who can show the Peekskill Police Department how to get more officers on the beat (the political motivation behind the purported need for more police) without adding additional personnel. Trimming that small amount from the current budget can and should easily be accomplished. One thing is clear: The Police Department should not be turned into a political football, as some are now attempting to do.