stupid tax

The speaker discusses a recent audit report of the city's finances. They encourage listeners to watch the report on the city's YouTube channel. The speaker expresses disappointment with the audio quality of the meeting and criticizes the mayor's leadership. They mention previous discussions on the city's governance and state laws. The speaker highlights the decline in government funds from 2018 to 2023, emphasizing the significant drop in unrestricted funds. They express concern over the city's financial situation and emphasize the importance of the numbers in the audit report. Have you ever sat around the table with a pizza box sitting in the middle and there's one piece of pizza left and a bunch of hungry people are still staring at that last piece of pizza? They're wondering who's going to get that last piece of pizza and they're all adding up in their mind how many pieces each one has had and who ate too many and who didn't get enough and who was the dummy that didn't order enough pizza? I've been there, I bet you have too. That was a lot like Monday's city council meeting when they gave the great audit of 2024 on the books. There's some stuff you need to hear about, so let's get in the ring. Hey, welcome to One More Round Podcast, I'm your host as always, Keith Marshall, and I'm happy to have you with me today. It's a wonder that I can make an analogy about food or pizza on about anything because there are a couple things that are pretty important to my heart. I love to eat and I love football. What did you think of the ballgames this weekend? I don't know. I was happy to see the Tigers win, excuse me, the Detroit Lions win. Wasn't real pleased with Kansas City, I'm not a big Kansas City fan. Just the whole Kelsey thing kind of makes me sick to my stomach, but that's for another podcast or a sports podcast somewhere, I guess. But hey, I want to talk to you today about, I call it the great audit of 2024, they had an audit meeting on the books for Rafford City Government on Monday's work session, this past Monday, January 22nd. I want to encourage you to go to the Rafford City YouTube channel and listen to that audit report. When you just click on the work session, that's all you're going to hear, it's just the audit report. And that audit was given by Robinson, Farmer & Cox, Certified Public Accountants, LLC. They've been doing the city's books for a long time. They were doing it when I was on city council from 2010 to 2018, and actually it was the, if I wasn't mistaken, it was the same man that actually gave us the report then. And they go through all the city's funds, they go through all the city's books, and they rely on the material that's sent to them that they request from the city, and they take a hard look at the financial numbers and they compare it to years in the past. And they did that Monday night, and it was held, you know, like I said, as a work session for city council before the regular city council meeting. It's an annual thing, it happens every year. So you can track back each year and see how each year went. You can compare the numbers to exactly where they were, and it actually is a pretty bright spotlight. And when you hit this point, Facebook posts and podcasts and everything else just kind of go by the wayside, and you can look at the direct numbers of exactly where we're at. And that's why they did that report, because I've been saying some of these things for some time now. And I know there's some, probably the mayor and probably maybe even some other city council members that's been out in public kind of downplaying what I said. And I think if you'll listen to that meeting, if you'll watch that meeting on YouTube and listen to what's said, you will come away with a conclusion that old Marshall told you the truth about everything. And in fact, it may be a little worse than even I described. Now I will warn you, the audio on this meeting is not very good. I'm a little surprised that since we've been doing these meetings this way since 2020, that they have not figured out how to have microphones and everything working for every member that's there. If you listen to it, you will notice that the mayor's microphone is up 10 times louder than everybody else, which is kind of a microcosm of what we're seeing in the city. He has been large and in charge, and I believe he shares a lot of the blame and the credit for whatever's good and bad going on in the city, because he has been essentially running things on his own for the last four or five years, as the other council members have just kind of stepped back and city staff has stepped back and allowed him to do so. We talked about that in whatever, block one, two, and three, you ought to check those out because they kind of cover the way the city's been run and some of the things that's happened and how we've went against city code and state law and how our democracy kind of works in the city of Radford. So check those out. You'll learn a little bit. But like I said, I'm extremely disappointed. I mean, how in 2024 can we not put together a meeting that has decent audio where everyone can hear everyone that's speaking? I mean, I've been listening to the Nixon tapes from 1973, and I can understand what they're saying on those, but somehow in 2024, we can't get a YouTube channel going and cover that. I'm kind of not surprised, though. It's kind of what we're seeing across the board as far as the performance of Radford over the last four or five years. So for our time together today, I've divided this podcast into four segments, four segments that I'm going to talk about. Some of this information I covered, you know, under will Radford remain an independent city? Still true. Go back and check it out. It'll tell you a lot about what's happened, what got us to this point. But today we got to put together, or at least Monday night, we got to put together a few numbers that we saw there, and I encourage you, please go and watch this. You know, the title of this segment, I'm just going to tell you, it's called Numbers Don't Lie. And, you know, we can say what we can. We can put the rose-colored glasses on, and we can talk about how things are better than they seem or how someone's misrepresenting the truth. But it's kind of hard to misrepresent the truth when you have the numbers in front of you, because let's face it, two plus two will always be four. You can say it's five. You can say it's three. You can say it's four and three quarters. Two plus two is always going to be four, and when you see the black and white in front of you, it's kind of hard to hide from those things. So in this report, it was a 154-page report, and I'd like to have the whole thing. I believe eventually it will be available online for everyone to see, and you can check that out. It's usually on the city's webpage, and if you'd like to have a hard copy in front of you, oftentimes they take a copy down to the library where you can go and view it. I don't believe you can take it with you, but you can go and sit down at a table there and actually read it if that kind of thing interests you. I don't think there'll be a long line of people waiting to sit there, but I know a couple guys that'll be one in particular that'll probably be down there reading that and trying to glean a little more information from what's actually going on in the city. Now let me point out that this audit was from the books from 2023, so they cover that fiscal year as far as I understood it. One thing that they looked at was the total amount of government funds that the city had, the amount of money that was in the bank, so to speak, that's, I'm assuming, usable. I'm just going to compare it to numbers that I'm more familiar with. I'm just going to compare what we have now and what we had in 2018, which is before the present mayor and some of the others took office, and just give a look at an assessment of their accomplishments and assessment of what's happened within the city under their watch. So let's start with the 2018. According to this audit, the government funds in 2018, the government available funds was $5.1 million, $5.1 million, so what is it now? 2023, it had dropped to $2.3 million, more than half, quite a drop. Unrestricted funds, meaning money that's in the bank that you can use if you have a problem, you know, you have a difference, you have restricted funds and unrestricted funds. Obviously restricted, the word restricted means they are categorized for a specific thing that you have to use them for. You can't take them out and pay for a new, you know, if something breaks down or you need a new garbage truck because the other one broke down, you can't take it out and pay that. You don't use those funds for, you know, other unspecified things, you know, they have some rules about how you use them. But the unrestricted funds though, that's money that you would keep, you know, in your savings account, your checking account for things that you, whatever come up you needed. In 2018, we had available for our use at any time about $2.4 million in those unrestricted funds. So in 2023, how much did we have? $66,000. Now, that's unbelievable to me, $66,000. We were at 2.4 and just a few short years, we're down to $66,000. You know, that's, that's not a lot of money. I mean, I guarantee you, you as a, with you and your wife or maybe probably, I'm sure you by yourself, you have more money in your 401k than 66, probably you, some of you kids out there, you've got 66,000 in student debt. I hope you don't, mine don't, but I know some of you that, that might have that. Maybe that's another podcast we need to talk about is, is the student debt and the, you know, caught borrowing money for college and better ways to do things. But the truth of it is $66,000 for a city government that has a close to $60 million budget. That's absolutely atrocious. It's actually horrifying, truthfully, $66,000 and, you know, I talked about that a little bit in that previous podcast and there was some pushback that I heard on Facebook and some other areas about that not being true. But you know, as the title of this segment is, you know, the numbers don't lie and auditors not going to get up there and lie to you. And he let us know that, uh, that's where we're at now in that previous podcast on, you know, Radford and becoming losing its status as an independent city. We talked about how some of those things can happen. We talked about the fact that over all the funds over those years, we, you know, they had run through about over $20 million in ARPA funds and other funds that were available. That's pretty incredible, pretty, pretty incredible to see the city's wealth or its protection or it's a, you know, it's backup, it's, it's, you know, it's savings account to see that depleted and devastated to the point where you're down to $66,000 in case something comes up and you need to pay a bill. And we found out as part of that, that the city had borrowed $4 million when they got to this point. Now you know why the city jumped in and borrowed kind of a payday loan kind of deal. They borrowed $4 million. They borrowed that money because they were down to $66,000. Well payroll for the city of Radford is over $600,000 as I understand it every couple of weeks. Well, you're not going to make payroll with $66,000 are you? So they borrowed $4 million. Here's the kicker on that. And it's kind of an update. They owed every single penny of that $4 million the day they got it, I was told. And they spent the whole $4 million. Now we've said we're going to pay that money back. I think it was September. We've, we said we were going to pay it back by. I'm a little concerned that we're not going to make that. I don't know if we've paid even a dime of interest on that money that we've borrowed so far. I think those are good questions you should ask your elected officials. And what I'm hearing that's going on with the books of the city and the bills and the liabilities that the city has, they're still in the same spot. They're literally robbing Peter to pay Paul. They're stretching out bills longer than they should be. They're paying this bill and holding off on that bill. They're simply in a downward spiral and they're moving money around to try to survive week to week. And it's a scary situation and we should all be concerned about that. The auditor mentioned as part of his presentation that the last uptick in general funds, when we actually saw money increase, we saw our bottom line grow, was in 2018. But from that point, from that growth in 2018, it's headed down the hill. In fact, if you'll take a look at the graph that he shows, it looks like a, it looks like a ski slope. It really does. It reminded me of the time that my wife and I were crazy enough to take all our kids over to Winter Place. And you know, me, I'm, you know, I've just skied like any other, you know, amateur that just does it for fun every couple times a year. I don't really know how to ski. I can just have a little bit of balance and I can do it a little bit. And my kids taught me into going way up top and they said, oh no, Dad, this is the, this is not a hard one. You know, this is, this one isn't too bad. And I, I get up to that top and I look down and I said, oh goodness, oh Lord, I'm in trouble. And there isn't but one thing you can do, it's not like you can hit the elevator and head on down the hill. You either take your skis off and crawl and walk down the hill, or you get on those skis and see what happens. And that's where we're at. We're literally at the top of the mountain, or actually, no, actually, we're actually partway down the slope. And if you know anything about skiing, the further you head down the slope, when it's steep, the faster, the faster you get. And you know, at any moment, one little thing can trip you up and you're a snowball going down that hill. Bad things happen. You look like that guy on the ABC Wild World of Sports, where his legs are going this way and his helmet's going that way and his skis are going that way and, you know, and that's another sports analogy, but I tell you what, as a city, listening to this audit and watching that presentation, looking at the graphs, looking at the money, looking at the trends in every area, we are headed down that icy slope and heaven help us if we lose our footing. Because we are one major issue away from total dissolvency. It's not a joke. It's not a political ploy. It's not a, boy, I'm going to get back at them and show them. We are really in that shape. And anyone that denies it, who has better knowledge of it, ought to be ashamed of themselves, because we do all need to pull together and pull through this. There's some ways to do it. We're not doing any of them so far. There's some ways to do it, but we need to work together to make it happen. But denial is not just a river in Egypt. We can't just simply say, these things aren't really happening, because after watching this audit report, after seeing those numbers, after seeing those graphs, there's no doubt now, there's no doubt now, we're in that downhill spiral and we're going to have to figure out a way to at least make it to the bottom without crashing. One of the trends that he mentioned a lot with the numbers were just some basic things that are happening. And I'll get to that in, you know, in piece number three on this, my section number three. But we're seeing a situation where departmentally, in our different, like, for example, the electric department, we're starting to see the cost of providing electricity outpace the income. In fact, it is outpacing it, outpace the income of selling the electricity. And there's several factors and several reasons for that. But we're seeing that same type of characteristic across the board in other departments and in other areas of the city. Simply put, you know, our income is not keeping up with the amount of money that's going out. It's just not. And money goes out in a lot of areas and it comes in in a lot of areas. And it's an equation. You know, in the business world, if you run a business, income versus expense, income versus expense, it has to all factor together. And expense can be a lot of things. Expense can be, you know, the cost of materials that you're using. It can be the gas that are going in the mowers or the machines or the trucks. It can also be the payroll expenses that are going. We're going to talk about that a little later. Those are huge factors in any business. And it's a huge factor in the city as they're weighing income versus expense. And they're out of whack. They're going the wrong way in Radford City. And they have been for quite a few years now, at least four or five years. Now this audit report, and even as the auditor, you know, he said himself, he was just giving the cliff notes to a 154-page document that I don't have yet and that you don't have yet, unless they popped it online in the last day or so that I don't know about. So I'm not going to be able to give you every single thing. But these highlights that he gave, these cliff notes, you know, little line items that he mentioned are huge. They show the real horrible situation that the city has found itself in. And somebody who's sat actually with the same presenter in these audit meetings, I'm real familiar with his mannerisms and the things that he says. I guess I've sat in front of him. I don't know if he was always the one, but possibly as many as eight, I've seen these. I've never seen a report that sounded like this. He always had suggestions. One thing that he will always do generally is kind of hint at or recommend you raise taxes or whatever. He always wants, you know, he's an auditor, he's, you know, he's looking just at the pure numbers of a way to raise the revenue or the way to put more money in the bank, and taxes always looks like a way. I sure wouldn't vote for the guy for office because he kind of has a one-track mind on that. But I could tell by the way he was expressing some things, and I think you will be able to tell too, that things are not good, things are not trending in the right direction. He even mentioned a couple areas that concern me, just little bullet points, just things he mentioned, and he doesn't mention things by accident. There's a problem, I think, when he mentioned them. He mentioned something about disclosing, you know, some overexpenditures of appropriations in the general fund. They weren't disclosed or properly documented. That really bothered me. I wonder what that is, overexpenditures of appropriation in the general fund. He mentioned something about other economic disclosure forms that he did not see, and he looked on state websites that, you know, we would normally put them on. We did not have them there. So there's some, you know, it may mean nothing, but to me, just kind of reading in between the lines, just kind of seeing the seams on the fastball, there were some concerns there from the audit group about some things that the city possibly was not forthcoming with or was not on top of. But basically, you know, I don't want to go any deeper right now into the numbers because, you know, they were the cliff notes, but we just got a pretty strong summation of where the city's at. Our trends are down. We are bringing in less money than we are spending, and we're out of any more wiggle room when it comes to money in the bank to cover bad decisions. You know, when you have money in the bank and you have some money in savings, when bad things happen, or even if you make bad decisions, as I say, you have some cushion there. You have some bounce back there. We don't have any bounce back left. We have simply spin up our ability to react or to counteract bad decisions. Now, the next section I want to talk about here in this podcast is bullet point number two, and that's the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and I don't mean that in a slang way. This is a G show, all right? I mean it in a serious and an honest way. Of all the analogies and little sayings out there, that's one of the ones that I've found to be true in so many different areas. We have good intentions or things that we intend to do for the right reasons, but when they're poorly researched and poorly implemented or done without factoring in all the other situations around you, oftentimes what were good intentions can be disastrous to us, and you can use that saying in so many different areas, whether it's your relationship with God or whatever it is, but in this case, I'm using it with decisions that were made on behalf of the Radford City residents by our members of council, those that we elected to be in charge of the city's finances, to make decisions on how to spend our money, and I think over the last four or five years, we have seen the culmination of poor decisions rocket us down that ski slope to the point we're at now. So what are some of those poor decisions? You know, we all like nice things. We all like to have cool stuff. We all compare ourselves to other localities, just like people compare themselves to their neighbors. It's not any different. When I was on council, that was one of the things that I experienced a lot, both from people in the public and other elected guys and gals, that they really wanted to do great things and have cool stuff that other people had, and I'm not any different. I feel the same way about those things, but you have to balance those things with where you're at in life. I mean, that was something that my mom and dad taught me when I was a kid, just a basic life lesson. You know, I would say, how come we don't have such and such? Jimmy over there has that, or so-and-so has that, and they'd say, well, you're not them. We don't have the money for that, so no, you're not going to have that, and I didn't like hearing it, but it was emphatic, it was honest, it was straightforward, and that's the way I was taught to live my life. You know, you live within your means, and what we've watched as they've worked their way down this slope, you would think they'd be figuring out a way to slow down, but they seem to have kept putting stupidity on top of their back to pick up speed as they went. Things like, you know, pocket parks and skate parks and, you know, these ideas of building these, you know, standing trails and making these, you know, these nice areas in East End, all those things are cool ideas and things that we would all like to have, but looking at it from the context of what we've witnessed now over the last four or five years in the downward spiral that everyone had to know was going on as they went, those decisions to spend that money was irresponsible. Let me give you another one that was absolutely irresponsible, and I mentioned it, you know, in a previous podcast, you know, the Rapid Romania Independent City, and that's the 8% raise we gave our employees the last cycle, 8%. Now, you say, you don't like our employees? Oh, you know, that's not it. That's not it. Hey, I'm a working-class guy just like they are. You know, I really appreciate raises, and they help my family. They help me to have nicer things. I'm able to put more money back for my kids' college. I'm able to go on vacations or, you know, stay in nicer places than I usually could stay. I'm able to afford a better vehicle. There's a lot of things that I appreciate about getting a raise. But more important than the raise to me is the job. I want to keep the job. I would rather have a long-term job than a short-term raise, if that makes sense. And 8% in a city that's in the financial situation that they're in is absolutely irresponsible. And in my personal opinion, that's malfeasance when it comes to budgeting and when it comes to spending taxpayer dollars. So what's 8%? You know, that's over a million dollars a year, if my calculations are correct. And where I get that is, you know, I don't know exactly what our payroll is, but I think in the presentation where they borrowed $4 million, our city manager mentioned that our payroll was over 600,000 a year, so I just did the math. You give an 8% raise on over 600,000 a year, you're getting up there in a million plus. Well, would you like to have an extra million dollars in your finances right now? Sure you would. Now, do employees deserve a raise? Oh, they do. They really do. But I think they understand when the city's in the financial situation it is, we can't always afford that. I know I spoke to several city employees this past December. The city employees did not get a Christmas bonus for the first time in quite a few years, and they all understood it. They said, how can you give a Christmas bonus when the city doesn't have any money? That's irresponsible. And, you know, I know they deserve a raise, and I agree, they weren't making what they should. I know the time that I was on council, from 2010 to 2018, they got a total of like 14.5% in raises over that time. For a few years, we couldn't afford to give raises because the city was in pretty tough shape after the Foundry had closed the first time when I come into office. So we weren't getting raises then. So we gave Christmas bonuses and we gave some extra days off, you know, just to let them know we're trying to move that direction. And then when we gave raises, we were able to give a couple percent or three percent. And that's generally, you know, if you work, that's kind of the raises that you see, a couple percent, three percent. How many 8% raises have you got? And ask yourself this, if your company was in a horrible financial situation, they were leaning towards insolvency, they had $66,000 in the bank, would they give an 8% raise across the board? I don't think so. And I'm also learning about some other things in that same vein, and I'm not going to get into those now. I'm still researching that. But there were some other irresponsible decisions along that line that were also made that we simply could not afford. Were the intentions good? I assume they were. I assume it was not an intent to buy votes or to try to get people on their side. I don't know. I'm going to assume that it was to give well-deserving people a little extra money. And that's that well intention that leads you in the bad direction because your desire to do something great has done something horrible. It was a bad decision. And it's financial malfeasance. That's just a couple examples. Like I said, the raises, the pocket parks, the extra money for these really nice things that we'd like to have. They're cool looking. They're awesome. I like them. But they're irresponsible in the face of the financial situation that the city has been facing and is facing now. Now, in the face of those decisions to spend that extra money to pay those large raises, to build the pocket parks, to make these little decisions on East End and some other things that we were doing, while we were making those decisions, we were facing what I'm going to call in bullet point three or the category I'm going to use, we were facing a situation where our income was falling. That's why I call it point number three, falling income produces bad outcomes. You know, we realize that it's hard to keep up these days, don't we? We've watched under Bidenomics, we've watched inflation go through the roof. We've seen gas prices go up exponentially. Interest rates have went through the roof. The cost of a gallon of milk, a pack of bacon, a jar of peanut butter, whatever it is, everything's went crazy. You know, I know my wife, she hates going to the grocery store. It makes you mad when you go and you see those prices. Well, it's not just us that inflation affects. It affects the city, too. So, you know, the many departments that we have, whether it's the electric department, water department, clerical items, whatever it is, the cost of everything is going up. And that's certainly not the fault of anybody in our city government, elected or otherwise. Those things were kind of dropped on us by, you know, poor management at the federal level from Joe Biden and his cronies. Bad decisions. We saw the Keystone Pipeline close down right at the beginning, and, you know, we've watched gas prices skyrocket through the roof. Just stupid decisions. But they trickle down. They have trickled down to us. And, you know, we face that onslaught of price increases and, you know, the rising cost of doing business in every category. The city's had to pay the extra cost of gas and diesel and equipment repair and all the other areas that's being passed right down to us. So we're not exempt from that. But in the face of that, in the face of those, you know, falling, you know, those rising costs, our income has fell. We've seen a decrease in the amount of revenue that we're bringing in, or at least I'll say probably more accurately, the revenue that we are bringing in, if it hasn't decreased, it's certainly not kept up with the rising cost of doing business. Now, I told you everybody's experiencing that. Christiansburg's seeing the same thing, Blacksburg, Pulaski County, all those areas, but there's a difference. It didn't affect them like it did us. They got ARPA funds, maybe even less ARPA funds per capita than we received in some cases, but they're just fine. Their reserves are strong. They're not having trouble budgeting. They didn't make the bad decisions that we made. They lived within their means while still growing and prospering somewhat, even in tough times. We did not. Our falling income produced bad outcomes in the city, and it did so because of how irresponsibly we used the funds that we had. And it also did so, honestly, because we didn't plan for future growth. We let sit idle some areas that we should have been working to develop, and that includes the foundry property. You know, a lot has been made about the recent purchase of some land over at the foundry. By the way, it's still sitting, languishing, doing nothing. We've not moved it over to the EDA. It's still sitting there. We're not developing a plan. We're not recruiting businesses. We're not doing anything right now, just like we've not done anything for the last four or five years with it. It sat still until some members of the EDA jumped up and said, if you're not going to do it city, we're going to do it. And I think the mayor and some others worried that someone else was going to get some credit, jumped in there and said, hey, we'll buy it. And now it sits idly by with nothing happening. So we let that land sit for four or five years when we could have used a major development there, a medium-sized or large business coming in that are using our electricity, that are using our water and sewer, that are bringing in revenue for the citizens of Radford, that are busting up or rising above their increasing costs that we're experiencing to change the equation where our expenses start to fall behind our income. But that hasn't happened. It's set still. We've talked about all the great things that we've done and we've beat our chest and we've talked about, you know, donuts and pizza and a lot of things that are cool but that simply don't pay the bills. That was one of the things I warned about when I ran. I could see that kind of trend going. We like cool things. We like to have some of these businesses that other areas have so we can brag about them. And I like them, too. Don't get me wrong. We need those things. But if you do not have industry in our city, we're not going to survive, okay? We have some great manufacturing plants. Cole Morgan, and they have a new name now. I'm sorry. The new name escapes me. But Moog and some others that are growing, okay? We've seen a new business come into town called Aranzi who so far have not added the employees that's going to really increase production. But I'm hearing they're moving quickly towards that. And that's a good positive thing. But it's not enough. I know it's not enough because I watched that audit report. The numbers don't lie. Remember, that was point number one. Numbers don't lie. We're not bringing in enough income to cover our expenses. We're not doing it. Those properties should have been developed years ago. When I sat on council, there was others that were in opposition to development. I begged them to do it. I pushed and pushed and pushed, and it just didn't happen. And for the last four or five years, it sat again with nothing happening. It's still sitting there. Brush growing, holes in the ground, wildlife area, whatever you want to call it. It's just sitting there unused and unappreciated. And we should have been using it and developing it years ago. We've missed the opportunity. And now the question is, do we have time to catch up? I hope so. It's going to be a tough slog, but we've wasted a lot of good opportunities there. Because falling income produces bad outcomes, especially when you do nothing to counteract that falling income. Now, finally, I'm going to hit on a couple of topics that, oh, you're not going to like hearing them. If you'll listen to the end of that audit report, and you'll listen to a particular line of questioning from our mayor to the fellow who was giving the actual audit report. The mayor asked a question about the town of Blacksburg and Montgomery County and other areas, Christiansburg, I think. And he wanted to know if it was reasonable that our taxes were so much lower than those of other localities. The inference is clear. We need to raise taxes, right? Well, I told you from the beginning, that's usually the recommendation from these audit reports. They are every year, raise taxes. In fact, that's something we've seen is a lot of tax raising since 2018, and the mayor and the present administration took over. If you really want to look at it, when you look at the increases in real estate tax assessments, and I'm not talking about the great reassessment of 2023, I'm going to get to that. I'm talking about the ones previous to that. And you can't just look at the numbers and say, okay, it was 76 cents here, it's 84 cents here, that's only 8 cents. No. You have to factor in reassessments and how they adjusted the rates. If you look at it, though, if you look at how much more we're paying in real estate taxes in 2024 versus what we were paying in 2018, it's approaching about 12 cents more out of your pocket. So we've seen, and we know the numbers say 8, but when you look at, like I said, the real estate reassessments, you're pushing up to 10, 12 cents per $100. What you're seeing is fairly large increases in taxes, and we have less money now than we did then. Now, how is it possible from the auditor's own words that in 2018 we saw an uptick in funds without the tax increases, but after close to 12 cents increase, over the last four or five years, we have decimated our funds and we have no money. We're flat broke. One reason is we have about $57 million in debt. We've like doubled the debt since 2018. That's one reason. That doesn't help you in making payments, doubling your debt. That's a bad idea. Spending money you don't have, establishing projects to do, new projects, that you don't have the income to justify or cover, those are areas that are really, that'll harm you. You can't raise enough taxes for stupid decisions, okay? And what we're going to do, and I mentioned that, this is point number four, bring on the stupid tax. Bring on the stupid tax. And what do I mean by that? You know, that's an old saying. I use it. I don't know if you've heard it before. But when you do something really dumb financially, at some point you're going to have to pay the penalty for it, and it's called the stupid tax, you know. When you're over at Sheilers, and you don't have any intentions to buy anything, and you and your wife are just riding around, and you see a really cool big black diesel truck, big tires, everything's looking good, and a salesman comes out there, and he pitches this thing to you, and he talks about a deal. You went from not even needing the truck to owing $50,000, haven't even figured it out on your income. You just bought that thing, and you said, oh, well, we'll figure it out. Well, you know what? You will figure it out. And at some point, you're probably going to pay that stupid tax, the tax that you pay for doing something really dumb financially. And guess what? Guess who's going to pay the stupid tax in 2024 for the poor decisions made by our present elected officials over the last four or five years? Guess who's going to pay that stupid tax? You're going to pay that stupid tax. I'm going to pay that stupid tax. We just had a recent reassessment. It was incredible, okay? I know I've heard from some of you guys talking about your taxes or your evaluation of your house, the value of your house going up 35, 40, 50. I've heard 60, close to 70% in some cases. That's a lot of money. Now, I know the city will, you know, according to the law and what they have to do, they'll adjust it back to where it needs to be at one point, but they'll have to make a decision what the new tax rate is going forward. And I'm going to tell you, based on that little conversation back and forth between the mayor and talking about bringing our taxes up to other localities and what we're going to face to talk about the cost of utilities, the fact that the electric department's not bringing enough income, water and sewer's not bringing enough income, guys, we're about to pay the stupid tax like you'll never believe. We're about to see tax increases in the city of Radford like we have never seen. It may not be avoidable at this point because of the poor decisions that's been made over the last four and five years. We're in trouble financially. We have no prospects on the horizon to increase those levels of income. Radford University has cut their enrollment in half. That's something else that's been mentioned by the auditor's report, how poorly the attendance is at Radford University now. Their numbers are down to about 4,900 students from the 10,000, 11,000 that we were looking at many years ago. They've bought up a lot of our property off of the tax rolls. We're not bringing that in. We've compounded dumb decisions like the incentive given to the new Hyler Hotel. By the way, that passed with a 3-0 vote here recently. I can't blame the present council, the ones that are recently elected for what happened over the last four or five years, but they definitely made this decision to give that incentive, this time in a city that has no money, with the idea that, hey, they're going to pay meals taxes and other things, so we'll make it up there. Well, let me give you a little news flash. Did you know that little restaurant at the Hylander Hotel has been closed since, I think, the beginning of December? They're not planning to reopen again until March as they quote-unquote restructure things? The busiest time of the year for high-end meals, and we're not collecting anything from there, yet they're getting a 60% reduced discount on their real estate taxes to a city that has $66,000 in the bank! Really? That's just amazing to me. But you know who's going to pay for it? I'm going to pay for it. You're going to pay for it. And it doesn't matter if you pay taxes, whether you're young, middle-aged, or you're one of our senior citizens, they're going to pay the stupid tax for people that made poor decisions, poor decisions, with the city's finances over the last four or five years. You're going to pay it. And we're going to have to. I hope it's low as it can be. I hope intelligent people realize that just raising taxes is not a way to dig yourself out of a hole. It does not replace bad decisions, it just compounds them. I use this analogy. A friend and I were talking the other day. You're in a pizza parlor and it used to be full. Friday night it was full of people. But nowadays, it's only about half full on Friday nights and you've seen your numbers go. For a while you were breaking even and now you're losing a little money. You're wondering if you can stay open. And someone has the bright idea, I know how we can fix this. Let's just raise the price of pizza. That'll fix everything. We'll just charge more for the pizza. Well, you know what, guys? There's a reason they're not eating your pizza. And it's not because of the cost. It's because of the quality of what you're providing. And when it comes to local governments, that quality is dependent on good decisions about what resources you have. When times are tight, pull things in close. When you have land to develop, develop it all. Use the same principle that's being done right now with single family housing, there was a huge win and a huge accomplishment over the current council and past council. Whether they had anything to do with it or not, and I would probably say they didn't, but I'm going to give it to them because they were there. Great increases in single family homes. Big money for the city. It helps with water, sewer, real estate taxes. Bring people in the city, the residual spending that they have. Use the same approach. Identify any possible amount of land that you can use. The little lots around the industrial park. The land coming off the interstate to bring in gas stations or whatever, a K&W or something. But work and promote those areas. Get that land to the EDA, the foundry land, and let them get to work. Quit trying to build allies. Quit trying to bring in people to get on your side or pack boards with people that are going to do what you want. Don't worry about that. Get the land to smart people and let them make good decisions because you're not going to make good decisions yourself. You've proven that in the past. And this recent reassessment that just hit us, the one that's all got us scratching our head and dipping into our wallets over, you can't blame that on anybody in Rapid City Government or the council. That's not their fault. That's a product of a city and an area that doesn't have enough single family homes and the prices are skyrocketing and they're using the real evaluations of... And I'm not saying that they're all correct. You should go and take every opportunity you can to make sure yours is assessed fairly. But overall, the assessments are up because the cost of housing is growing. When it grows, your assessment goes up. But it couldn't have happened at a worse time, especially in the situation that the city's in. We're going to get hammered, I'm afraid. And you know who it really bothers me? What it really... The group that I'm really worried about, there's actually two of them. And that's the very young and the very old. The older group because, you know, they don't have... They can't increase their income. They can't take a second job. They're living off of Social Security and maybe a little pension that was worth something 30 years ago that's now pennies on the dollar to what it was worth before. And the idea that their home is going to, you know, going to be worth so much more and they're going to have to pay higher taxes because of it and then this inevitable increase that's going to this stupid tax that's going to come because of the poor decisions, it really angers me on their behalf. I can remember going door to door and meeting with those people. I can remember talking to a lady in particular. And she's passed on now. And I know we do have some situations and actually she was a result of me meeting with her. We were able to get some things changed for some of our elderly people could, you know, get a little more off of their real estate taxes if they fit into this category a little bit. It didn't cover it all. But this particular lady, I met with her and I knocked on her door and she told me that the thing that concerned her most was real estate taxes. And the reason that they did was she had a little money in the bank and she kept just enough money in the bank to cover her furnace. One of her fears was that her furnace would go out and that she wouldn't have money to fix it so she'd be warm. She kept enough money for that and she kept enough money to bury her. And every year she started saving a little bit at a time, a little bit at a time knowing that twice a year those real estate taxes were going to come and she needed to be able to have enough to make those payments. That really, you know, it broke my heart. And there's a lot of people out there like that. And when you make dumb decisions like that it doesn't just affect, you know, yourself. It affects people like this lady. Alright? And, you know, I mentioned it affects the very young. In our city, in our country actually, not just our city one of the ones who paid the highest price in terms of the American dream have been our young people. With these interest rates that shot through the roof and they're up six, seven percent a house you used to be able to get a couple hundred thousand dollars already. The cost of the housing is high. It's worth more than it was. A few years ago that house was $100,000. Now it's $200,000. And you're not getting three and a quarter percent. You're getting six and a half. In some cases they've already bought it seven. Now on top of that we're going to strap those young people that are struggling to start new families and begin their American dream we're going to strap them with the dumb decisions we've made and they're going to see not only exorbitant costs for the housing itself and then the high interest rates they're having to pay for their loan we're going to tack on top of that a big increase in the cost of real estate taxes. Not to mention hey maybe a little gain in your electric rate and your water and sewer too. Congratulations, welcome to Radford. That's not the direction we need to go. We shouldn't have found ourselves in this position. But we're in there now. And it's going to be tough to get out of it. You know I guess maybe this whole thing and the issues with finances in the city and what can happen is a pretty good example to us of something to follow in the 2024 elections to come. We need to make good decisions with the people we choose, don't we? We need to put people in office that know what they're doing that have the common sense and the ability to listen and learn and to follow smart people. We need to look at people that have made bad decisions in the past and realize hey we don't want to vote for that guy again. Personally that's why I'll be voting for Trump. There is no way that I could possibly trust Joe Biden with our national economy or our national defense or anything else for that matter. I'm going to go with the guy who did it right the first time. In spite of the warts, in spite of the tweets in spite of the dumb comments and the mud puddles and all the things that I didn't like I'm going to go with the guy that got it done. And in our own city elections have consequences and when you pick people that are not experienced and that put their own self aggrandizement ahead of doing the right thing for the citizens you are going to pay for it. I told somebody the other day I hate to tell you that I told you so but I'm going to tell you I told you so. All that and I guess $5 will get you a cup of coffee. It's not worth anything now. The mess is made. We're in it. We've got to get out of it. So some smart decisions have to be made. Moving forward we're going to have to make better use of our funds. We're going to have to cut things back to the bone. There are some people that are making bad decisions that may have to be replaced. And we're going to need to be careful with what funds we have. We need to take care of our school system and make sure that they're getting what they need. They're going to be a victim of this too I'm afraid in the near future if this doesn't turn around. We're not going to be able to make our payments to the schools that cover a significant portion of their budget. In this audit they mentioned that there's a good possibility that funds from the state will drop towards our schools in the years to come. That's going to be tough on them but they sure can't afford to see the funds from the city drop either. Now in order to survive this, just like any traumatic injury, we're going to have to stop the bleeding. We can't afford any additional cuts to the body, to the government as far as losing more funds. We're going to have to draw things in tight. We can't afford any more major expenditures until we get things under control. We shouldn't be talking about an amphitheater and investing in that. We don't have the money. Not sure that I like the way that it's trending anyway, placing it on our used property or our used campus. I think that's ridiculous anyway. But right now we can't afford an amphitheater. We don't have the money. We need to get out of this hub mess that we're being pulled into by the university and draw together and figure out our own plan about how to fix these things instead of being drawn into adventures with people who we've kind of proven in the past are not on our side. We need to end that. We need to end it quick. We need to, you know, like it used to be in my house, growing up, we're going to have to eat beans and cornbread as a city for a while. Things are going to be tight. We can pull our way out of this, but we've got to first stop doing the things that got us in this mess. We can't give large incentives to people like the RU Foundation and the Highlander Hotel. I'm for incentives, and sometimes they make sense. But we've got to make sure that we're actually making money from that incentive and not losing money. At this point, after giving up $500,000 in incentives for utilities, I'm not sure we're going to make it back anytime soon. Poor decisions. We've got to stop. We've got to stop the bleeding on that. We've got to stop doing that. Unfortunately, we're not going to be able to give any more 8% raises to employees. It's going to have to be a reasonable raise or none at all until we get this taken care of. They won't be able to blame a careless council that doesn't care about them for not giving them a new raise. They should look back and blame the council that was irresponsible with city funds for the reason they're not getting raises in the future because they squandered our wealth and they squandered our funds. It's going to be tough for quite a few years unless something changes. But while it's tough, while we're eating those beans and cornbread, let's develop that foundry property. Let's not make it a political football that we're throwing back and forth. Let's get that done. Get it to the EDA. Let's get moving on that quick. Let's meet with our elected representatives in Richmond, Senator Hackworth and Delegate Ballard. They're in session right now. Have we met with them? Do we have anybody going down to talk to them about what the needs are for Rafford City? Do we have a plan that we put in front of them about what we need from the state to move forward? Have we even talked to them? You know, every other locality are there right now meeting with them, having private meetings, having delegations go down. Do we have a delegation going? Or has politics kept us from making good decisions for the city? I bet it has. I bet we have no plan in front of the state. I bet we have no plan in front of our delegates to do anything different than we've been doing the last four or five years. We've got to make a change there. We've got to do things different or you're going to stay down that slope that we're on now. You know, and one other thing, and I'm going to finish up, but one other thing that I think is very important that we do and we do now, and that's be honest with our citizens. Let's not keep telling them that everything's okay, that we have plenty of money, that this was just a little hiccup in the road, that people are misrepresenting the truth. They can watch themselves now the audit report that shows the funds that we got down to, $66,000. They can see the difference that's happened over the last four or five years. They can see that now. There's no hiding from that. Let's be honest about it. Let's move past the politics of it and move into the honesty of it and let's fix the problem or at least give it the best try that we can. I'm not sure we can at this point. I'm not sure we're not a member of Montgomery County by this time in 2025. I'm not sure. I hope not. But let's give it the best shot we can and we probably need to start by being honest, don't you think? Everyone. And part of that honesty is taking responsibility for what you did or didn't do right and not blaming it on other people, not going back and saying, well, the previous counselor did this. No, you're there. You've been there four or five years. You own it. You own it. Don't blame our constitutional officers or someone else that has a different bookkeeping system that are only pass-throughs. They're not to blame. No. No, you can't blame people that's done a fine job for 20, 25, 30 years and blame them for the mess you've created over the past four or five years. No, you can't do that. You're responsible. You fix it. We put you there to do it. You fix it. And whether or not you claim responsibility, whether you're an elected official or whether you're on city staff somewhere, whatever you do, at least play to the whistleblows. Give it all you got to make sure we can turn this thing around. Coach used to say, run to the football, okay? Run to the football and play to the whistleblows. Give it all you got, in other words. Don't quit until there really is no hope. I do believe there's hope. I do believe we can fix it. It's going to take hard work and it's going to take some different tactics and some different approaches than we've used for the last four or five years, but we can do it, I believe. But we got to do it right and we got to do it now. All right, it's been a tough podcast. Tough for me. I'm a little more direct than I like to be. I like to have a little more fun than these, but this subject's no fun. I'm watching my city die and it's dying quickly and it's happening quicker than I could imagine. You know, sometimes it's no fun being right. But we're going to get past that and we're going to look towards the future and hopefully we can fix things and move in a better direction. A good direction to always move into, I think, is the word of God. We can learn a lot there. And by the way, I'm not perfect. If I'm insinuating that, oh boy, if Keith Marshall was there, everything would be great, you know, I don't know. I don't have that much confidence in myself. I won't say that. I certainly could have done worse, but I make my own mistakes and do things wrong too. But I like to think when I do, I'm honest about it and I try to fix them. One important way to be honest and what keeps us honest is the word of God. So I want to read to you our theme verse for the day. And as always, it's found in Ecclesiastes chapter 12 and verses 13 and 14. And God's word says this, Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter. Fear God and keep his commandments. For this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil. I want to thank you as always for joining me. I appreciate you being here in the ring with me. Tough subjects, I know, but we'll get through it. Hey, God bless you and your family. I look forward to having you join me here again next week. Thanks.