Editor:

We all value Councilman Lonnie Mixon’s financial credentials, and his forecast that at our current rate of spending we will be deep in the red by the end of this year, but the Fairhope City Council will be making a huge mistake if they force through a 2 percent sales tax without first undertaking a rigorous budget review. It’s a mistake on two levels. First, their refusal to listen to their citizens’ insistence for the review is making this town very, very angry. Second, Mr. Mixon’s forewarning, “If we keep going at the rate we are, it will be 2020 before we pay off the debt,” should be turned on its head — we don’t have to keep spending at the rate that we are.

The rule of thumb in business is that you can lop off 10 percent spending without even feeling it, and you can get up into the 15-20 percent range with out-of-the-box thinking that doesn’t have to be attended by massive pain. The fat in the city budget — every budget has it — can be routed out by doing things differently, doing some things less or not at all, and asking for creative ideas from the people who know best, the city workers, right down to those on the bottom rungs, whose intimate knowledge of the nuts and bolts of our current way of doing things is an untapped resource.

Without a carefully drawn budget, how will we know if just a 1 percent tax is sufficient, or, if we could take a little more drain for a few months while we get changes in place, we could be back in the black within another 12 or 18? The Council members, most egregiously, have not even addressed how long it would take to do a proper review. Rather, they have rejected it out of hand and are acting like the sky is falling, á la Hank Paulson, to the extent that they have scheduled the vote for Monday night despite the fact that the council president will be out of town. We should remember that Paulson changed his bank rescue plan after he had more time to look at it.

Perhaps the council should visit with “Hurricane Hazel” McCallion, 88, who has served as mayor for over 30 years in Mississauga, Canada. Under her hand, Mississauga rose from a small bedroom community in the 1970s to become the nation’s sixth largest city, with 680,000 residents. Like Fairhope, it has a superior quality of life and high growth rates, but — hold on to your hat — it is debt-free and has $700 million in reserves, to boot. Her prescription? Keep your taxes low, attract jobs and pay as you go. She has been submitting the city’s annual operating budgets to residents for their review and scrutiny since 1991. And no doubt, collected valuable input that has fueled their success.

The Bell System, where I spent my entire career at AT&T suffering and managing repeated downsizings, was torn apart — its one million employees, hundreds of billions of dollars in nationwide infrastructure, and thousands of operating systems for long distance and local service that were integrated like taffy — in less than 23 months, so don’t say we cannot accomplish a budget review in the space of one or two.

Fairhope