Remember those Skillicorn “Tax Cutter” yard signs? Those are code words for “program elimination,” “staff reduction,” “revenue starvation,” to name a few. Remember that quality-of-life feeling you had when you decided to make Fountain Hills your home? You might want to consider what those code words will mean to you in the future.

In order to pay for something as a tax cutter, you have to eliminate something. You cut everything including critical repairs, like school water mains and community center leaks.

Councilman Skillicorn is already on a tear. He’s proven that no program dodges his wrath (even highly qualified staff) and that he will play musical chairs with budgets. Who knows what will be left standing after his Hunger Games. Fix those roads? Repair the name-sake Fountain so that we don’t have to mothball it? Advocate for local and regional needs? Not in his cost-cutting fever dream. Not if it has a cost.

Here’s a cost-saving measure: Why doesn’t Skillicorn and his new budget marauders decline their $400 Town monthly salary? It’s a small amount, but it would show their commitment to cutting costs!

So, if you liked the holiday lights on the Avenue, or our uncluttered political sign-free streets, finding regional solutions to homelessness, or ensuring that the state legislature doesn’t tell local government what to do with what they don’t have, you won’t get those things with Councilman Skillicorn or his furious flock.

By the way, if our new council marauders ran a business, pay raises would be unheard of. The encouraging message to employees would be “You don’t need a raise, you need to cut your spending and get your financial house in order. That’s not my problem, it’s yours. A penny saved by you is a penny I don’t have to pay you. Yippeeee!”