I oppose the rise in property taxes proposed by the Kent City Council to balance the city’s budget for the following reasons:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u2022 The council has already increased the garbage rates for customers in order to raise funds for repairing city streets.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u2022 There is $11.4 million of financial reserves, according to city finance director Aaron BeMiller, of which $2.6 million can be used to pay off the debt of the ShoWare Center, leaving roughly a $9 million surplus.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u2022 This surplus of roughly $9 million of financial reserves should be returned to the taxpayers in the form of drastically reduced property taxes or actual refund checks.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Other proposals to utilize assets of which the city owns already:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u2022 Use the ShoWare Center as the new police headquarters.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u2022 Fire the managing caretaker of the ShoWare since the center will now be the new police headquarters.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u2022 Fire the city finance director and the chief administrative officer, which would save the city approximately $300,000 annually.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u2022 Leave B&O tax rates where they are so as to further encourage businesses to relocate to Kent, instead of driving businesses away by raising the B&O taxes.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Once we reduce the city’s cost structure in these ways, the council will discover there is no need for higher taxes.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u2013 Mark H. Ekern<\/strong><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I oppose the rise in property taxes proposed by the Kent City Council to balance the city’s budget for the following reasons:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-19349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19349"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19349"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=19349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}