Rebecca Bays for higher spending

By John Labriola - Citrus County Commissioner Rebecca Bays last week tried to rebut Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia's March announcement that Citrus County is overtaxing its residents. 

At a candidate forum in Lecanto, Bays presented a PowerPoint reflecting the county administration's talking points to justify Citrus County's budget, which Ingoglia had said contains $39 million in excess spending when indexed for inflation and population growth from a baseline of six years ago. 

Bays, who is running for reelection on Aug. 18,  cast the deciding vote in 2023 for a massive 18 percent tax increase, which she claimed was needed to cover a constitutionally mandated employee pay raise and to speed up road resurfacing. 

She said the average Citrus County taxpayer pays $1,279 a year in property taxes, the equivalent of $106 a month, which she said is less than the $140 average monthly phone bill.

"That's not waste. That's value," Bays insisted.

Imre Beke, a marketing consultant from Homosassa, questioned Bays on a proposed constitutional amendment this November to eliminate homesteaded property taxes, a measure endorsed by state Republican leaders including Ingoglia and Gov. Ron DeSantis. If the amendment is approved, he asked if she would allow residents to keep the money in their pockets or tax them for it in other ways, such as by raising the local sales tax.

Bays initially avoided answering the question by saying Citrus County's taxes are lower than much of the rest of the state, but Beke pressed her.

"You're not answering the question, though," he said. "Will you commit to leaving the money in our own pockets?"

"Then I'm going to tell you no, I'm not going to tell you that. You're one person. There's another 171,000 people out there that want services," she said. "They still want the fire truck to show up when they need it. They still want the ambulance to show up. They still want the policeman to show up."

According to Ingoglia, only 64 of the 278 full-time employees the county has hired in the last six years are first responders. 

Bays has repeatedly opposed efforts to cut other parts of the budget, including a modest motion last year by Commissioner Diana Finegan to adopt the rollback rate for the county's library budget, which would have resulted in a small cut in the tax rate for library services but kept the funding the same as the previous year by allowing the increase in county property values to cover the difference. The library's budget includes a $312,000 line item for the purchase of about 1,300 books a month, including numerous LGBT titles for children.

Bays was also questioned last week about the county commission's decision to remove Elaine Kleid from the Library Adivsory Board. Kleid, the elected secretary of the Citrus County Republican Party and a highly respected conservative, was removed from the library board in 2025. This February, Commissioner Finegan made a motion to put her back on the board, but Bays instead moved to appoint Terry Morriston,  a retired liberal teacher-librarian who has advocated for LGBT Pride propaganda displays in the libraries and has made campaign contributions to not only the Citrus County Democratic Party but also to Democrats around the country, including two separate $250 contributions to Barack Obama in 2012 and a $250 donation to Joe Biden in 2020. 

Bays was asked if she wanted to apologize to Kleid, who was in the room. 

Showing her arrogant disregard for both Kleid and the questioner, she stiffened for a moment and then asked, "Any other questions?"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Library board bows to haters of Charlie Kirk

Image
By John Labriola - The Citrus County Library Advisory Board (LAB) meeting last week turned into a hate fest against Charlie Kirk, as leftists angered by a motion to commemorate him with a library display outnumbered residents supporting the idea. Rita Fox of Lecanto said Kirk, who was assassinated on Sept. 10 by an angry leftist, deserved it.  "When you preach hate, things like that are bound to happen," she said, attacking Kirk for rejecting Marxist ideas like critical race theory, for which she accused him of "white supremacy." "In the end, the violence he rationalized and the racial fear he amplified converged in his own fate," Fox threateningly stated.  Later in the meeting, she and another liberal woman stormed out shouting obscenities at LAB Chairman Justin Strickland.  Other leftists said Kirk was a "racist," "bully," "bigot," "homophobic," "incredibly divisive," and a "white Christian nationali...
Read more

Schlabach still causing Citrus County problems

Image
By John Labriola - Citrus County voters thought they had seen the last of former County Commissioner Ruthie Schlabach after her humiliating election loss last year. Sadly for the public, Schlabach is still finding ways to cause problems for the county.  The latest controversy involves her role as a lobbyist for The Southern Group. Last month, she convinced the commission's current chairwoman Rebecca Bays to nudge County Administrator Steve Howard into secretly signing a $3 million appropriations request to the state legislature to widen County Road 491 on behalf of the lobbying firm's client, Metro Development Group, which has an open application to build a 5,000-unit project along 491 called Tuscany Ranch.  In an email to Howard, Schlabach asked him to sign the funding request as soon as possible.  “That way, we can show you the money!” she wrote. The problem is that the rest of the commission never approved or even knew about the request, a serious breach of protocol, ...
Read more

Citrus County among biggest spenders in the state, Ingoglia says

Image
By John Labriola - Citrus County is one of the biggest spenders in the state and is overtaxing its citizens to the tune of over $39 million a year. That's according to Florida's Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia, who held a press conference in Lecanto on Tuesday to share the bad news about the county's finances. Ingoglia, who previously served as this area's state senator, has been presenting his findings on overspending by cities and counties across the state as the Florida Legislature gets ready to hold a special session next month to place a constitutional amendment on the November ballot to reduce or eliminate property taxes for homesteaded properties. He has identified $2.02 billion in overspending by over 15 governments. Ingoglia's methodology involves taking a local government's 2019-2020 general fund budget and indexing it for inflation and population growth to determine how much it should be spending. Anything above that, he says, is just wasteful...
Read more