Editor:

It’s hard to grasp how a small community like Pine Cove could ever have a surplus of over $660,000, monies raised from our property taxes that were never spent.

Our local governing body, better known as CSA 38, has come clean. They can no longer justify raising our property taxes, while sitting on a huge surplus of over $600,000, unspent collected tax revenues. The mathematics is staggering. How could we in Pine Cove have overpaid our taxes by $600,000?

How could our CSA 38 ask for and keep collecting such an enormous surplus? For how many years, even including when we had the Idyllwild ambulance?

I was there at their meeting last year, when the CSA board (with the help of a county representative) figured out a loop hole how they could continue collecting the tax. Even after realizing the surplus and acknowledging the money was not being spent for its intended purpose, they squeezed us for yet another year.

But now, it’s become too huge, too ridiculous of an amount of unspent tax dollars from the people of Pine Cove. They can no longer continue.

In the real world, there’d be apologies, the officers responsible would resign, and the money would be returned to the Pine Cove taxpayers who paid it. But that’s not how government works. They are scrambling desperately right now to find somewhere, anywhere to spend it before too many more questions are asked.

The chair of the CSA 38, the same one who presided over this boondoggle, also is in charge of our water company. He’s scrambling, too. Next month, Jerry has to justify why we’re still on the edge with a Stage 2 water emergency, despite all the precipitation, the drenched hillsides and the wells that should all be replenished.

Norm Cassen

Pine Cove