The recent claim by the Developer’s puppets (Butler, Burgess, and Printz) and their supporters that county taxes were really not increased 25 percent is a bald-faced lie!
They were, and they were increased for one reason: to pay for County infrastructure necessitated by the Developer’s massive expansion of The Villages while preserving the Developer’s sweetheart impact fee. (An impact fee is a per/house fee, charged when a building permit is issue, which is supposed to pay for infrastructure necessitated by the new construction.) The combination of the tax hike for us and the sweetheart impact fee for the Developer results in the Developer’s scamming hundreds of millions of our taxpayer dollars. Every time you pay your county tax, you are, in essence, writing a check to the Developer for the amount of your tax increase.
Remember that the massive expansion of The Villages (which has been facilitated by the Developer’s puppets) is making the Developer a second fortune, but it is bringing the rest of us:
- higher taxes,
- traffic congestion,
- wear and tear on our roads,
- crowding at our amenities and businesses,
- additional sink-hole risk,
- more strain on a second-rate health-care system, and
- an at-risk water supply (remember, we had water rationing a couple of years ago).
It is also turning our county into a huge Villages sprawl and totally destroying the “friendliest-home-town” atmosphere that used to exist here. Why should we subsidize all this with a tax increase? (BTW, as a Republican, I think that businessmen making a fortune is great, but don’t do it at taxpayer expense.)
Residents have now awoken to all this and are poised to act, but the Developer is not going to give up his lucrative relationship with the County Commission without a fight. Don’t let the Developer and his little group of political insiders steal the election by using:
(a) fake candidates, Wahl and Prince, to disenfranchise 45,000 voters;
(b) semi-literate, loony emails from Jerry Prince, who is both the head of the Republican Club and a fake candidate for County Commissioner, to endorse incumbents that he is ostensibly running against;
(c) puff-piece articles in the Developer’s Daily Sun about what a great job the puppets have done; and
(d) contributions from suppliers and associates to avoid campaign-contribution limits and give his puppets a couple hundred thousand dollars to give back to him through ads in the Daily Sun.
In the August 18 Republican primary, vote for the EMS team: Estep, Miller, and Search, who are now formally endorsed by the POA. Write their names down on your calendar. Tell your friends to do the same. Go to www.fg4s.org and donate and/or volunteer. Sanitize the Sumter County Commission cesspool.
Let’s hope for an honest vote count.
Scott Fenstermaker is a resident of The Villages.
