The Town Council has placed a high value on building up citizen trust and providing transparency to the public. I hope that means (no more) private meetings of three council members with a person from the Crystal Lagoon Co. and things like that.

Let’s look at transparency. The council had a Pavement Management Analysis Report done in April 2018. I ordered a copy of it and it’s 440 pages long. The graph on page 22 clearly shows only 4.5 percent is rated “Poor” or “Very Poor.” On page 21, it goes on to state Fountain Hills falls within the average of others surveyed by Infrastructure Management Services (IMS). Other condition ratings for that graph include “Marginal,” “Fair,” “Good,” “Very Good” and “Excellent.” Not only will a $10 million bond pave all the very poor and poor roads, it will pave many of the marginal roads.

The council and the tax-and-spend people keep telling us they need a lot of money to do maintenance on the roads. Why, then, did I find in FY 2017-2018-2019 that 10 projects are being proposed? Paving the shoulder on Fountain Hills Blvd, a study to widen the same road to extra lanes and another study to make part of Shea Blvd six lanes. Cost: $914,884. Three new parks, total cost $8,585,362 – that’s millions. Two projects for the Fountain Park, total cost $3,456,406. Last, changing lighting at two parks to LED fixtures. Cost $1,733,000. Another $450,000 traffic signal. Funding priority for eight of these projects: “Low” and “Medium.” The total is $15,139,652.

That amount is almost the entire four-year fee. The bond guarantees that the money will go to the roads. The fee is for whatever they want to call “infrastructure” and “maintenance.” The next council might want to keep it?