VICTORY

Though the official results have not been released, it looks like I came in first on the Politicalknoxville.com straw poll for District 1A.

Thank you to everyone who voted for me. I appreciate your confidence and will continue to work diligently for the next month and a half to bring about the change that is so needed in county government.

The next step will be the beginning of my door to door efforts. I plan on knocking on as many doors as possible to bring people my message of an open and responsive county government, while keeping taxes low and encouraging growth.

It's time to begin the final push. Again, thank you for your support and I hope to see everyone out on the campaign trail to thank you personally.

The Schools Budget

Well, I just had a very educational (no pun intended) experience. I attended the briefing on the upcoming school budget and I learned two things:

#1 - The KCS' (Knox County Schools) budget is a huge $350 million plus

#2 - The money comes from so many places, and at so many different times, it's no wonder that the schools are always out of money.

Over the course of an hour, I heard a presentation that described the budget process and fund allocation in a way that slowly, but surely, confused me to bits.

It began with a simple enough breakdown of where money was coming from (though they left out a good portion of unnamed federal funding) and digressed into a series of "expenditures" that no longer were accurate since the time they were proposed.

Here is my frustration. I want to understand, and I am going to go deep into this budget to find out really how much money is needed and how much is allocated. But the explanation was so overly complicated that it was difficult to follow much less comprehend.

Some highlights of the evening:

$4.41 million in new monies for staffing the new Hardin Valley School (one time expense)

$1.57 million for a "redesign" of Fulton and Austin Easy (and I don't mean aesthetically)

$1.37m Debt Subsidy

This above is an increase in the amount Knox county is paying in debt service. In the coming year, the total debt for the KCS is supposed to be around $25 million dollars. With my quick math, at an assumed interest rate of 5% that means the annual interest we are paying for our borrowed money is $1.5 million. This cannot be allowed, we have to be more responsible than this.

All in all, it was a very worthwhile excursion into the nitty gritty of how we finance our biggest county service. I know I'm not running for school board, but as the county commission has to approve the KCS' budget I plan on being deeply involved with cross examining the proposals.

A Second Promise

No new Taxes.

That's it. It's simple, it's effective, and it works.

Knox County, under my watch will raise no new taxes. No property tax increases, no wheel tax increases, no sales tax increases. In fact I will do my best to lower taxes.

Knox County makes a good deal of money and as it stands now, the money they take in covers those necessary and existing services that have been established. Also, that money comes from many different sources. The load of raising revenue is spread into many different areas of the citizenries life in order to reduce the amount of pain that is felt at the time of paying taxes.

If the County so desired it could issue a general tax bill to the citizens for the county asking them to pay, in a total lump sum, what they owed for the privilege of living in Knox County and partaking in the services offered. The bill could be broken down by the cost of Schools, roads, Parks, Sheriffs Office, Judiciary, and so on. This bill would likely be thousands of dollars depending on the person and would go over like a lead balloon.

All of that to say, we have multiple taxes right now that all feed into the same pot. To increase one is simply disingenuous as it is an overall increase in the tax burden of the people. This is why I say no new taxes. There must be a better way to deal with budget needs. I have my own ideas on it which I will get into in the near future.

Write-In John Spellings