Beaufort County’s $59.1 million budget has over spent itself into a $2.6 million deficit, and taxpayers need to connect the county board’s record of aggressive taxation and careless spending with November’s election and the long shadow this over-run casts on the 2018 property revaluation.

For over a decade, taxpayers have funded failures in industrial parks, speculative building construction, hospital remodeling and hospital divestiture, along with foolish studies of jails, ethanol scams and abandoned scrublands, while funneling grant money to the board’s favorite cronies and an assortment of the board’s pet vote-getters.

Predictably, county commissioners, lacking in any entrepreneurial experience of their own, blundered their way through a fortune in other peoples’ money, while creating a disaster heralded as “economic development.” County commissioners who never invested their own money in any of the products, businesses or jobs that actually underpin an economy, were all too ready to imagine themselves as “captains of industry,” when spending tax dollars taken from of their neighbors.

As cheap tricks go, this has been quite a costly experience for the homeowners and local businesses that ended up footing the bill.

Every community needs the basic services that government provides: courts, police, fire and help for the truly needy; but no community should be deceived into believing its economic viability is dependent on government-owned industrial parks, high taxes or how much public money can be stuffed into the pockets of private businessmen.

As long as our high property tax rate remains the county board’s cash cow, this waste is likely to continue. By last summer, tax revenues had increased the balances held in the county’s various bank accounts to a level $18 million above anticipated needs. In effect, taxpayers made possible nearly $15 million in waste and favoritism while funding another $18 million in excess fund balances for our commissioners to dole out at their whim.

This money was taken from the pockets of every tenant, homeowner and business in Beaufort County. Every dollar of this idled and misspent $33 million represents things we were denied the opportunity of providing for ourselves and our families: clothing, groceries, dry cleaning, charitable contributions, equipment upgrades, oil changes, shop tools, prescriptions, school supplies, mortgage and credit card payments, church diners, ad infinitum.

What we received in exchange was nothing anybody in his or her right mind can find any use for. For all taxpayers could have had, what we do have is vacant real estate and lost opportunities.

By using property taxes to fund a grab bag of politically motivated big-ticket failures, the county board has diverted the flow of $33 million in privately owned resources away from thousands of alternative and individually arrived at choices of private spending. These were choices local businesses and consumers could have benefited from had they only been given the chance. But instead of allowing this money to have channeled itself into a useful stream of voluntary exchanges and spontaneously regenerating economic activity, our commissioners chose to turn private wealth into public waste.

Warren Smith is a Beaufort County resident.