Commentary: Where's the sense of fiscal responsibility?

In order to get the budget balanced the property taxes have been raised, along with our water and sewer rates.

The school district is short more than $5 million. We are designing and talking about financing the multipurpose athletic center. The legislature will be in session shortly and they will possibly hand down obligations to the counties, as they did last time they were in session.

Teachers and state workers want pay increases and want to raise taxes to pay for them.

At a time when revenues are down and the bright spot in local sales tax collections is the car dealerships we are talking about getting rid of our sales tax advantage with the surrounding counties?

This is a good time to raise sales taxes and commit the "full faith and credit" of Carson City to a minimum of $28 million to build a beautiful new office building and plaza downtown?

Cities all over the country are going bankrupt over projects like this that promoters "promised" would pay for themselves with revenues. When these people sold these projects they promised all kinds of jobs and out of the area new revenue, but when the dollars don't materialize they say whoops we made a mistake and walk away. There is no accountability. The taxpayer is on the line for that money.

Reno and Las Vegas are seeing these problems and this is with projects which actually do bring some tourists to town and or get the local people to go out and spend money that they would not have otherwise spent i.e.: tickets to ball games, food, retail etc.

A library is not going to draw people from out of the area, and it is not a retail outlet , and neither is BRIC. We are talking about mortgaging our children's futures locally on top of the debt that they are being saddled with nationally.

Since when does the definition of civic pride require spending millions of dollars that we don't have? Where is any sense of fiscal responsibility? This community has had to raise taxes and fees to pay for our current obligations.

This is what has been going on nationally, spend now, throw those dollars around and hope you have the money to pay for it later: it hasn't been working out well there either. If we had piles of money sitting around doing nothing, maybe this would be the way to spend it, or maybe civic pride would dictate it be given to CASA or Ron Woods Center or the greenhouse project, but we don't have any money sitting around.

If the private sector feels confident with the economy and wants to create a feasible project that actually will pay for itself, wonderful.

I guess this makes me a negative Nancy, but please join me and vote NO on CC1

•-Ann T. Nunnemaker is a Carson City resident.