Those of you who wish to return to the good old days of balanced budgets, surpluses, healthy infrastructure and flowers coming out our ears, forget it — and, to be candid, I’m not sure we’ve ever had it.

The reason we have now come to a crisis is that we have been deceived. Every year we have been told by our (up until now) CEO/CFO/mayor that everything is fine. Surpluses every year (a fiction), balanced budgets (fiction), healthy infrastructure (fiction), and low utility rates (based on fiction). The flowers, on the other hand, are factual.

Now we have come to the day of reckoning: huge debt ($35+ million), serious utilities infrastructure problems (over $600,000 in emergency repairs in 30 days), and the freight train of a $1.5 million shortfall this year alone — and that’s if no major storms hit.

Now, to my mind, it’s been hard to blame the council up until now, for up until now the council was really just a group of part-time, poorly compensated, virtual volunteers who actually had businesses and lives beyond city government and relied on the one-man near-omnipotent mayor to keep them informed. For some strange reason, department heads whose hiring and firing, salaries, budgets and benefits were controlled by the mayor always reflected the same rosy picture the mayor painted.

This is said to contrast the very different and gloomy infrastructure picture we see now that the council has taken an active part in hiring and firing review.

Because of their oversight role, the fairytale has been exposed, and the result of years of encumbered debt, gross neglect of infrastructure (due to milking the utilities dry) and lawsuits due to inconsistent practices (so many that we currently pay between $500,000 and $750,000 a year just to handle ongoing legal fees) has become evident: We will start running out of money to pay the bills within months, with no alternatives except to raise already high usage fees and impose a 2-cent sales tax.

But wait! Mayor Kant has valiantly vetoed the proposed tax. He says there is “no emergency” and that he has “a plan” (even though he has produced nothing in over two months). With this plan, even with the council-proposed 50 percent cap on utility profits (he had previously been taking 75-80 percent), he can somehow magically pull us out of this deep hole — a hole whose existence he didn’t even acknowledge until just a few months ago!

Now, it is my belief that his “plan” is more fairy dust and that he knows full well the new tax and rate increases are necessary just to pay the bills and begin to build an until-now nonexistent reserve, which we desperately need to face an unknown future.

Dean Mosher, a Fairhope resident for 35 years, has chaired numerous committees and boards. He currently serves as vice president of the Fairhope Single Tax Corp. and is a professional artist known worldwide for his epic historical paintings.