So Fountain Hills has a “shoestring budget.”

Only a politician could call our town’s FY15-16 budget $13,903,466.00 a “shoestring budget” for a town with a population of 23,235.

Maybe if you add the new $3 per month fee on each of 13,000 parcels of land in Fountain Hills, which will generate $468,000 annually, the added school fund of $750,000 for the 2015-16 academic year and the next six school years which was approved by voters, and the $8.2 million Saguaro bond added to our property taxes, the Republicans in charge can manage to keep our town running.

The new environmental fee will be billed semi-annually at $18 every six months instead of annually, which basically doubles the fee we will pay to the Florida company generating the bills.

It will cost our town $85,000 annually to have the Florida company, AMS, do the billing. This could reduce the amount of the funds available to our town budget from $468,000 to $383,000. This is not good town management!

How much would the billing cost be reduced if our mayor and Town Council voted to send out the billing statement annually? I believe all of Fountain Hills property owners could afford an annual bill of $36; especially if it saved the town $42,500 each year in billing fees.

What happened to the Republican Party’s and Grover Norquist’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge of no new taxes?

(Editor’s Note: Town Finance Director Craig Rudolphy told The Times the environmental fee will be billed annually at $36 per parcel, not semi-annually. The RFP issued by the town included a requirement to bill annually. The $85,000 cost is for an annual billing.)