Our current mayor, town council and town staff deserve a lot of credit for steering us through an unprecedented and terrible past year.

They manage to keep us safe, functioning and have even been able to provide improvements, all on a very slim budget. Often people want the town to magically provide things with no money and they actually did that. They recently managed to get us $4M worth of sidewalks for, literally, a fraction of the cost!

People are frustrated after going through these trying times and some members of this community seem to be stirred up and looking for someone to blame. The facts don’t seem to matter, that the town is not considering allowing a drug rehab facility and that signs are not being banned. All this energy could be going toward something that is going to affect us all in a big way, the proposed Flat Tax.

The Flat Tax will take nearly a million dollars from our town’s budget permanently. This is on top of the tremendous rise in costs for police and fire due to previous underfunding of their pension funds. Public safety constitutes about half of the town’s budget now and it goes up every year. Our very own Representative Kavanagh is in favor of this tax. Who would have ever imagined that he would effectively vote to defund the police?

This Flat Tax will save you and me a couple of bucks a year unless you are in the top 20 percent of Arizona earners. This idea will also strip the education tax that we voted on and approved last year, which is probably the whole point of this Flat Tax runaround.

If our community really wants to raise a ruckus about something worthwhile, it should be this!