To the editor:

This note addresses Richard Heckler’s April 16 letter. Heckler certainly has a broad agenda – a bit hard to price at that. When coupled with the initiatives proposed by others we could well be looking at a $50 million capital investment. Add in a 3-5 percent annual increase in property taxes that will be required to simply pay cost of living increases to our city employees. Then there is another $10 million or so to fix our roads properly. Finally, the costs of addressing “global warming” will not be trivial. In aggregate, this comes to a tidy sum.

Heckler proposes an up-or-down vote on each of his proposals. I thought we already did that in the last City Commission election. We turned out the tax-and-spend majority and elected a group of more fiscally disciplined commissioners.

Our big spenders are probably going to look back on the early years of this decade with longing – property tax revenue increasing in some years at close to 10 percent. We are almost certainly not going to see that again for some time. Factor in the escalating costs associated with many of life’s necessities and it would suggest that we take a “timeout” on big new initiatives. Despite the flights of fancy by some of our more progressive citizens, we really do not have a currency printing press in the basement of City Hall.

George Lippencott,

Lawrence