Our board of county commissioners continues to wrestle with a difficult decision: how to close a huge budget gap, largely of their own making. They cite the two hurricanes as the dominant reason, but our budget storm has been raging for a very long time. Regrettably, I even recall certain elected officials decrying over the last couple of years that our county was in good financial shape because it received a clean audit, not understanding that audits don’t measure financial sustainability. Unfortunately, it’s times like this that remind us we have a leadership vacuum. The county commission once again failed to pass a millage increase for Fiscal Year 2018-19 and punted the decision, yet again, to July 30. This is not exactly a portrait in political courage, especially when one considers how long they’ve been warned this day would come.
