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Propaganda For Manassas Park
By Greg L | 16 March 2007 | Manassas Park | 5 Comments
Today’s Manassas Journal-Messenger has a tremendous puff piece which announces that Manassas Park City Manager Mercury Payton has found a way to balance the 2007 fiscal budget. Well, Glory Hallelujah! How did they manage to accomplish such a remarkable feat? They spent less!
Well, not really.
The 1.5 million shortfall in expected revenues was offset by reducing payments to the city schools by about half a million dollars. Isn’t it nice when you can pass a big chunk of the problem on to the schools and have them deal with it? The remainder of the shortfall was largely made by shifting accounts around and tapping into unused reserve balances, so really there wasn’t any spending reduction, but a mixture of pass the buck and some accounting tricks that actually allowed the city to fund a new position for a billing clerk during a year that there was a budget deficit. No, Manassas Park didn’t in fact discover fiscal restraint as the article suggests. They’re just getting some love by the Journal-Messenger.
Now we move on to fiscal 2008, with the sun setting in the background and a nice soundtrack queuing up:
Now he and other staff members are looking to make the proposed fiscal 2008 budget the most uniform and equitable for all Manassas Park residents.
How inspiring. Is someone running for office here? This sort of glittering generality is worthy of an unpaid campaign volunteer crafting cheesy soundbites for a soil & water board candidate’s first campaign event. The paper doesn’t really explain how Manassas Park intends to shift part of the current real estate tax into a new garbage collection fee — allowing a meaningless tax rate reduction that is entirely offset by the new fee which will end up being a small tax hike, or how the 2008 budget is predicated on overly-optimistic economic assumptions that no other locality dares to depend on. Instead, it takes every statement made by park officials at face value, and dresses them up in campaign slogans.
One of the few remaining parallels that Manassas Park needed in order to complete it’s striking similarity with Kim Il Sung’s North Korea was an official news propaganda agency. Now the picture only seems to lack starving masses of conscripted laborers building statutes in honor of Frank Jones. If the irrational revenue forecasts which underpin the 2008 budget fail to materialize, maybe we’ll be able to entirely complete this picture
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There must be some mechanism by which the State Government can be requested to audit the books of a municipal jurisdiction, perhaps as part of the investigations already going on. I seem to recall a previous incident whereby the City Council was claiming a (approximately) $510,000 shortfall for the City schools and the IDENTICAL amount in potential income from the passage of off-track betting. Strangely enough, it was in that same year. Coincidence?…I think that there are just too many of them.
HUZZAHS!
The folks in Manassas Park balanced their budget. So that explains the smell. All of those shoes that had to be taken off, to count on toes…Manassas City was inundated with the smell of Nacho Cheese Doritos! The hazmat teams had to roll to Quarry Station and administer O2 to several residents, as the feet-funk overwhelmed them.
If they would stop kissing illegal a$$ and offering them everything free of charge then maybe they would have some extra money?? As high as my real estate taxes are I can’t believe there is a shortage. We still even have to pay $20 for our stupid car stickers which ffax county did away with. I even had a cop (nice enough as he was) stop me a few weeks back to tell me that I needed to put mine on. I actually had it in the car and never bothered to put it on. Looks like my plans for moving out of this dump town are down the toilet as well since the real estate market has tanked. Can’t wait to see how they balance the budget when 20% of the town defaults on their mortgages because there are no more construction jobs when the real estate market really tanks. Interesting times ahead my friends, and by interesting I mean scary.
“Can’t wait to see how they balance the budget when 20% of the town defaults on their mortgages”
The bright spot about this is that usually when you default on your mortgage you are forced to move out.
Therefore, that’ll be the 20% most expensive (tax dollars wise) residents of Manassas Park leaving. I bet the enrollment of those expensive ESL classes will drop by half, if not more. And so on.
Will it cause a decline in my property value? Most assuredly, but I never intended to move for a good while anyway. Plus I bought before the “boom”.
Also I expect lending standards to tighten up (several companies have already gotten out of the “sub prime” business) so that many of these people who default will probably not get another loan for a while, if ever.
I’ve been skeptical of Manassas Park in the past as well. But after looking around, requesting some records through FOIA, and speaking with employees, I have a few comments:
The city recently passed an independent, full-disclosure audit by an outside accounting firm with flying colors. What a great change from the massive problems that audits of the recent past have shown…
Spending was actually significantly reduced. Several projects were postponed or cancelled, open positions weren’t filled, etc.
The city’s credit rating has improved over the last year (I think it’s AA now).
With a budget shortfall, the schools must cut spending too by the same percentage…it’s a legal obligation.
Now for my opinions, for what they’re worth (not much…):
I don’t like the illegals either, but if they own property here, they do pay taxes.
As a former reporter, let’s remember the MJM (and any other media) isn’t the gospel…
I still think the car stickers are stupid, and 33 million for a school seems ridiculous…Time to contact the school board…
[Ed note: This comment posted from an IP address inside Manassas Park City Hall.]