Protect Rio Vista #1 objection:
Don’t my property taxes already pay for that!?
Certainly everyone pays their fair share of taxes, and property taxes do go to pay for police services. Let’s take a quick look:
A $500,000 house in Rio Vista pays a millage rate of 16.4392 or $8,220 in property tax. The City of Fort Lauderdale millage rate is 4.2536, so the City takes $2,126.80 of the total property tax bill. According to the City of Fort Lauderdale’s budget documents, the total City budget for 2009 was $327,485,911. The Police department’s budget was $91,647,022 or approximately 28% of the overall budget. So, if we take 28% of the City’s $2126,80 on your property taxes, the Police department gets about $595.50 of your property tax bill. According to the Police budget, the Operations Division (the folks driving the cars out on the street) receives $45,134,284 of the overall Police budget. That adds up to 49% of the overall Police budget, or $291.80 of your tax bill. But remember, this is the Police budget for the entire City. The budget shows 247 officers assigned to Operations. Let’s say 6 of those are assigned to work Rio Vista, or 2.4%. That means about $7 of the property tax bill actually goes to policing Rio Vista! $7 out of $8220 works out to about .08%.
We know that prior to the patrol we rarely saw police in our neighborhood. The reality is that even though there were officers assigned to our area they spent most of their time responding to calls in neighboring areas and rarely made it east of US1.
With the Rio Vista Security Patrol, we are able to piggyback on the City’s existing administrative costs and spend almost 100% of the fund directly on patrol hours in Rio Vista. I can’t think of a better value for the peace of mind we receive.
We have just over 400 member households as of this writing. There are 950 households in Rio Vista.
500 participating households would allow us to schedule 12 hours of coverage per day (we currently have between 9 and 10).
We urge all of you to encourage your friends and neighbors, living in Rio Vista, to join the Protect Rio Vista initiative.
Warm regards,
Steve Hudson
Chair Protect Rio Vista
The complete monthly logs can be viewed by clicking the button below. The patrol has also done more to calm the traffic in our streets than any speed bump will ever do. Making our neighborhood a safer place for our children to play.