Among the most offensive of local budgets this year has to be that put together in Gibsonville by town manager Ben Baxley.
We thought his initial proposal for a whopping 6-cent tax increase was unbelievable, and apparently he got enough feedback from his board that he trimmed it back to 4 cents before presenting the revised version last week, which was adopted unanimously by the board of aldermen.
But in the process of “trimming” back an unreasonably high increase, he slipped in yet another bureaucrat, a so-called economic developer, at the cost of $105,805.
There was no mention of such a position in his original presentation.
No discussion about it in the interim that we know of.
But, in essence, Baxley ambushed the public by burying this new position in his revised budget – without any advance public notice or discussion.
He apparently thinks that the small town needs an economic development specialist, who he says is going to concentrate on revitalizing the small downtown and/or bring in industrial prospects – although we’re not quite sure where he thinks he can fit such industries.
Moreso than cities twice Gibsonville’s size – Graham and Mebane, for instance – he’s thinking the town somehow should have a top priority of economic development other than the residential explosion it is already experiencing.
This is delusional thinking at its worst, and we’re disappointed that Gibsonville’s aldermen fell for it. Only mayor pro tem Mark Shepherd even seemed to have noticed the additional expenditure, and he asked a skeptical question but left Baxley’s increase untouched.
What should be especially infuriating to Gibsonville residents is that the one new bureaucrat alone accounts for almost a full penny of the 4-cent tax rate (1-cent on the tax rate is $118,281, most of one penny will go for this salary). Most of the rest goes for salary increases for the rest of the staff.
So the budget could have been cut to a 3-cent increase, still the highest rate of increase in recent memory – for the town, and the highest on the Alamance County side of the county line this year.
For those old enough to remember the comedian Rodney Dangerfield, Gibsonville has his kind of an inferiority complex, as in Dangerfield’s refrain, “I don’t get no respect.”
The problem is that Baxley town officials give credence to that very complex, as well as the pejorative epithet employed by one Gibsonville resident a few years ago, who relabeled the town as the mythical Hooterville, of the 1960s television comedies Petticoat Junction and Green Acres.
No respect. Hooterville. Gibsonville. It’s not funny in the way the comedian and comedies were.
