Is Maggie Brooks the next Joel Giambra?
Late last week Maggie Brooks sent me an unsolicited email promoting her budget
survey. I didn’t even know Monroe County had my email address. After a while I recalled that I had registered (several years ago) on the Monroe County site to get access to some property info when I was house-hunting. This is the first time they’ve sent me an email.
RT has discussed this survey before. I believe it’s just a heavy-handed attempt to make people to buy into a sales tax increase, by making it the most appealing option. The lengths Maggie’s going through to publicize the survey are surprising as well — sending unsolicited SPAM. (Side comment: I ALWAYS check the “don’t SPAM me” check-box when registering on a site, so either there wasn’t one or it was ignored in this case).
Maggie Brooks looks to be going down the same path of self-destruction as Joel Giambra, Erie County Executive from 1999 to 2007. Giambra pulled similar stunts that seriously damaged Erie County and ended his political career.
Giambra, like Maggie, pledged to never increase property taxes. After years of budget one-shots and misuse of tobacco settlement money to artificially keep property taxes low, Giambra ran out of gimmicks (just like the FAIR plan was Maggie’s last, best gimmick). Similarly, he tried to play the “I need to raise the sales tax a penny” card and also failed, so he implemented most or all of the items in Maggie’s Survey List #1 in his infamous “Red Budget” in early 2005.
I lived in the Buffalo area during this time and can tell you first hand that this level of mismanagement made him exceptionally unpopular, put the county into a crisis mode, caused a number of county leg members to get tossed in the next election, and eventually put Erie County under the management of a State Control Board — all because Giambra refused to raise property tax. I see Maggie going in these same failed directions — the parallels are remarkable. I hope Monroe County doesn’t eventually end up in a situation with a Control Board as well. That’s something that literally takes decades to recover from (in bond markets, financial ratings and such).
So Maggie, please don’t be another Joel. Monroe Country can’t afford it.
It’s not even a stretch to make the parallel with Giambra, which makes me surprised that it hasn’t been made before.
With regard to the property taxes? Ms. Brooks boasts another year of no property tax increases but, in fact, our property taxes HAVE gone up…significantly. You don’t have to increase the taxes, you simply overinflate the assessed value. Most people don’t make the correlation — and that’s why our property taxes increased dramatically this year.
It’s time for new leadership.
It’s also time Maggie’s family had to go out in the working world and fend for themselves. Husband at the Water Authority, step-son at RTS as a scheduler…
Wish I could be the County Executive and employ my whole family….
[...] wrote a guest essay for us a while back, comparing Monroe County’s current path to Erie County’s recent, disastrous past. But I didn’t it really came across how important, and scary, the comparison is, despite [...]