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What your Knox County P-card bought
Posted By katie allison granju
LVG breaks it down:
By now, any Knox County resident who hasn’t spent the last year in a cave knows about the lobster dinners, Smoothie King treats, cigars and other goodies we paid for courtesy of Mayor Ragsdale’s generous p-card policies. If you’re a homeowner, it might interest you to consider what part of your property tax payments have gone to finance some of the shenanigans in the executive suite.
The median price for a home in Knox County is around $130,000. If we assume that the appraised value is near that figure, at an assessed rate of 25 percent and a tax rate of $2.69 per hundred, the median property tax assessment is in the neighborhood of $874.
Of that $874, schools receive $399, debt service $108 and the remaining $367 goes into the county’s general fund. It’s the general fund that pays for travel/auto allowances, “business trips” to Las Vegas for the mayor’s senior staffers and plane tickets to far-off, exotic locations such as Nashville.
As responsible taxpayers and prudent homeowners, a few more details about how our $367 was spent can help us make decisions about not only the immediate future of this administration, but about what we’ll demand going forward.
For example:
At $137 a pop, our property taxes paid for nearly three months of Cynthia Finch’s “gold” membership at Club LeConte. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that most of us have never set foot inside Club LeConte – an “invitation only” establishment – or that we couldn’t afford the dues if we were asked. No doubt Finch is grateful for our generosity.
Gas prices are rising, but our $367 still managed to buy better than 100 gallons of fuel for the personal vehicles of employees in the mayor’s office. After all, who has time to fill out those annoying mileage reimbursement requests?
Although about $1,400 of the total ended up being reimbursed by employees or from the “Hospitality Fund,” it will take five years of our property tax money to cover the roughly $1,800 of alcohol purchases detailed in the latest p-card audit. County policy prohibits the purchase of alcohol with taxpayer funds.
Mar 16th, 2008
