Beaufort County Buys Luxury Vehicles | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Government officials living in the lap of luxury while us peons and surfs pay for it with our county taxes. This is happening here in Beaufort County.

    There is no more important duty of elected officials than to rein in excessive and lavish spending. The preset gang of five commissioners, and the Board during the past four years, has been very lax in providing any, even miniscule, oversight for wasteful spending. Commissioners, Booth, Langley, Evans, Brinn and Waters inexperience in management is manifested in their statements. One policy clearly set, and publicly stated is the Gang of Five will not manage, they rely on our employees and consultants to make these decisions for them. Guess why taxes have gone up every year during the past four years? Continuation budgets. With continuation budgets, no one has to manage or provide oversight.

    For those of us who are raising children and trying to make ends meet while we pay our exorbitant taxes, the September meeting was insulting. Charlie Rose, Chief Deputy, representing the Sheriff requested the purchase of five vehicles as follows, two super crew pick up trucks for $35,807.03 each, one Chevrolet Tahoe for $35,070.80, two Dodge Durangos for $30,743.00 each., The total came to $168,170.96. The list prices of these vehicles are considerably more than what is being paid. You as a consumer will pay more to get these vehicles. These were purchased from private vendors across the state. No information was presented about a bid process.

    Approval for these purchases was buried in the consent agenda. Items on the consent agenda are not presented for individual vote. Consent agendas are games lazy politicians, and government bureaucrats have invented to limit debate and discussion about purchases and policy. You will notice that I never vote for the consent agenda because I am not sure what I am voting for. Many unknown things can be buried in consent agendas.

    The only saving grace to consent agendas is that any commissioner may pull an item for individual vote. You may want to take note of who votes for consent agendas and who has items pulled for further discussion and vote. This tells you who is awake and alert and maybe who went through the agenda packet before coming to the meeting.

    You can see the entire meeting on the Beaufort County internet site, and look at the discussion about this vehicle purchase. The comments are interesting. Chief Rose claims that he is deciding who gets these luxury vehicles. Sheriff Coleman never comes to Board Meetings. What does Coleman do for his more than $100,000 each year.

    By comparison a Dodge Charger, used by road deputies, costs $23,724. Lets see, 5 times $23,724 comes to $118,624. That is a difference in cost of $49,546.96. Beaufort County paid 42 percent more for vehicles for the Sheriff than we should have paid. Do not listen to that bull that Sheriff Coleman puts out about saving the county money, or the bull Rose puts out about how much deputies have to haul around.

    The Gang of Five is responsible for this outrage. They gave the Sheriff $400,000 to buy vehicles this year with the average mileage of sheriff vehicles being less than 50,000 miles. Talk about bad management decisions.

    When I went on the Board of Commissioners and until Gary Brinn became Chairman, all purchases of vehicles had to individually come before the Board for approval even if it was in the budget.

    The Gang of Five, Demopublicans (a mixture of Democrats and fake Republicans), are doing nothing to control costs, overtime or the number of employees on the payroll. We added another employee at the September meeting. That is another $65,000 in expense.

    The Bible talks about trying to serve two masters. What about serving no one, not even self? Ponder this, you will know what to do at election time.

    Three of the Gang of Five are up for election in 2020. They are Langley, Brinn and Evans. They are big spenders. Do not let one or two votes that you approve of fool you into believing they are conservative.