FAMILY FIGHT
In an election year it’s natural to assume that political parties would fight each other as opposed to themselves. That is not the case this past week with Marion County Democrats, specifically speaking the office of Mayor Bart Peterson and the City-County Council controlled by Monroe Gray.
This fight is centering over, oddly enough, property tax cuts. Gray is introducing an ordinance that will use a fund surplus in the county’s tax increment finance (TIF) levy to provide residents with about $2.6 million in property tax relief. The purpose of TIFs is to take property off the general tax rolls and use the revenue to make improvements within the affected area. Gray’s plan would not take dollars from the TIF district per se and use it for tax relief because that is against the rules set down by the Department of Local Government and Finance. Money from a TIF district can only be used to benefit the TIF, not the entire municipality. So instead, Gray is proposing they are use money from the TIF replacement levy to provide tax relief.
This apparently raised the ire and temper of Chief Deputy Mayor John Dillon, who is the Mayor’s right hand man. When the Mayor’s office received news of Gray’s plan, Dillon called Council Financial Officer Bart Brown and was outraged. Dillon is known to have a temper. There is even an old story of him threatening to bring down hellfire on an AT&T technical representative who was trying to install a phone line in his office and wasn’t doing it the way Dillon wanted it done. Dillon reportedly told Brown that Gray should have cleared his plan with the Mayor first and that he threatened to have Brown fired after the election if he didn’t watch his step. someone should remind Dillion that Brown works for the Council, not the Mayor, and there’s is this little concept called separation of powers he might want to research before making threats.
As word of this got back to the Council President about not clearing his tax relief plan with the Mayor, Gray had two words for the Peterson. You can guess what they were.
I have been hearing stories of tensions increasing between the Mayor and Council for a while as the election gets closer and this story confirms it.
Election Day is November 6.
