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I should be so lucky

2 min read

To the editor:

In his letter, Mr. Carter tells us he will pay only $3 more tax to support the Fort Myers Beach library than he would pay Lee County library tax, and he uses “easy math” to make this calculation.

Let’s look at even easier actual math. The proposed mill rate for the FMB library is 0.4999 and the county’s is 0.3541 which is an increase of 0.1458 not 0.13 as in Mr. Carter’s letter.

This means that our tax is 41.17 prcent higher than the county’s and that the county’s is 29.16 percent lower than ours. So Mr. Carter’s $3 is 29.16 percent of his FMB library tax, which means his total library tax is only $10.28.

WOW! I should be so lucky and so should the Town’s business people, some of who have paid thousands of dollars each year to build the expansion. In 2010, our library mill rate was 77 percent higher than the county’s.

The 41.17 percent higher amount we will pay next year, if the proposed budget is passed, comes after the expansion is complete. As a community this means we will pay a $419,739 premium for having an independent library. It is lucky for Mr. Carter that he only has to pay $3 of that sum.

He asks the “misguided and ill-informed protectors of our tax dollars to get a library card and relax.” The sad truth is that us taxpayers and I suspect most of the friends of the library, probably including Mr. Carter have been UN-informed as to the misleading methods used to fund the expansion.

Peter Reid

Fort Myers