Nothing excites the imagination of our county board like spending other people’s money, and the county’s property taxes give them plenty to be excited about.

Over the last 10 years, Beaufort County has seen a $39 million school-construction program that built classrooms in areas of the county where there were too few students and left students in other areas of the county with too few classrooms. Taxpayers spent $18 million to remodel a hospital and within months sold the county’s entire 50-year commitment to healthcare for what amounts to less than $20 million. Roughly $12 million went into an economic development program that was wasteful at best. It took a countywide election to derail a $23 million proposal to build the first phase of a 350-bed prison facility to cure, what is at worst, an occasional problem with where to put a 10-inmate overflow from the county jail.

It is difficult to believe that a small group of men, no matter how dysfunctional and poorly qualified for the job they were elected to preform, could have done so much damage in a county this small.

In 2010, during the housing collapse, the county commissioners were given a choice: reduce spending or increase taxes. They chose to increase taxes. While real estate values fell and population growth stalled, both the money being spent by county government and the property taxes being collected rose more rapidly than the incomes of county residents. Even though budgeted spending has jumped by over 10 percent during the last two years, the surplus cash held in the county’s unrestricted funds account has risen more than $7 million above traditional levels. Add in the $6 million sitting in the hospital reserve and we have $13 million in taxpayer money idled and withdrawn from the economy by virtue of the bloated valuations commissioners used to set the property tax. The money quietly accumulates while waiting for the commissioners to create another industrial park fiasco, undertake the next unsellable spec building or launch a new plan for developing a mega-joke-jail.

Beaufort County is a wonderful place to live, but its population has actually decreased between 2010 and 2014. We used to have 20,000 people regularly at work, today there are only 18,500 employed.

The county board is a stone around our necks. For five election cycles, county commissioners have let the taxes being collected float higher because it allowed board members to continue sponsoring pet projects and wasteful spending. This was all made worse in 2014 by the board’s expressed intention to incur $20 million in debt without ever seeking the consent of the voters. The commissioners literally see what we earn as being more theirs than it is ours. Their wishes for how our money is spent overshadow the priorities we have in providing for our own families.

In 2016, we face another county budget process and an election leading into the next revaluation. Do not waste this opportunity to make lower property taxes the issue every candidate must address.

Warren Smith is a Beaufort County resident.