Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Town of Olive Bank Statements, 9-30-09

Through a freedom of information law request I obtained the Town of Olive's bank statements. I had written the request about six weeks before the election in early November and Sylvia Rozelle, the Town Clerk, handed me the statements about 10 days after the election.

Notice that taxes are collected in January, so about 9 of 12 months or 75% of the year had gone by when these balances occurred. With a quarter of the year left, the Town had the following balances:

$1,044,475.38
880,511.51
393,626.14
115,170.24
201,267.64
4,758.24
-----------
$2,441,541.51

The 2000 Census found that the Town of Olive had a population of 4,579, according to Wikipedia. Thus, the Town had about $533 for every man, woman and child. That's probably more than many could afford to save because of all the taxes that they're paying to the Town. Total spending is about $4.3 million, according to the Olive Press so the cash balance is 2.4/4.3 = 55.8% of spending when 25% of the year was left. Nevertheless, the Democratic Party chose to raise taxes by over 6%.













2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It would be interesting to see if/how this changes through to the end of the year - Do you plan to continue posting this information?

Mitchell Langbert said...

I haven't thought about posting additional but if there's interest I can do another Freedom of Information Law inquiry. There is certainly a positive balance because the capital account is largely unspent during the year and has been accumulating by transferal of positive balances from the other accounts. I think the time to get additional information is in February. Also, my understanding is that the Olive Press is going to run an article on the balances soon.