PV Bonding To Increase: Long Term Tax Costs Sure to Rise

Just read the LI Advance and learned: that the village now intends on taking a new bond for road repairs, sidewalks, new equipment in the amount of about 1. 5 million dollars.

These bonds are loans on the future we should all remember. The Village has just obliged itself only a few months ago to pay for a 375,000 bond for the repair of the Patchogue Theater roof. It recently approved an 800,000 bond for a sewer pump replacement on So. Ocean Avenue. The village as per the Mayor may soon be deciding whether to build a parking garage and other related parking projects in the amount of 6.1 million dollars. There is also talk that a complete repair of the Patchogue Theater may take 1.5 million dollars and unless a source is found to pay for that that amount it could be subject to bonding too.

This is of course on top of all the bonding the village is currently still paying off including a relatively recent bond of 175,000 for the “thirty year” roof for the Theater that is now replaced by a “fifty year” roof at nearly two times the cost.

How does this impact taxes? It does because the village must make payments towards principal and interest for the terms of the various bonds. Every dollar committed that way is one less dollar for something else and every dollar spent must be accounted for somehow and that usually means taxes are increased.

While some of these bonds may be unavoidable not all of them are. A parking deck does not have to be built when surface parking lots are far cheaper to build. The Patchogue Theater could be privatized allowing its sale to a private company that could invest in further upgrades instead of the tax payers of the village being forever burdened with repair costs. Sale revenue could then be re-invested to pay down current bonds or even to reduce taxes for once instead of seeing them raised again and again. 

This potential bonding spree ought to be a signal to the public that it must become involved in the current budget process. The long term consequences of burdening the Village with debt upon debt can not be good. If other means can be found to free up money they ought to be looked at first however hard those decisions might be. But unless the public starts to get involved and stays involved more and more this appears to the course our elected leaders are on.

Their intentions may be good but no one is perfect and no one group has a monopoly on the true course about how to run the Village. Public input is needed always to make sure the best decisions are made. But the public must do its job too and that means in this case getting involved now while there is still time to influence future decisions.