I'm recalling a report from the first county board meeting after One Sumter resulted in the election of enough commissioners from TV to gain control of the board in 2004. I can't provide a reference, but here's what I recall.

When the board chairman, one of the old commissioners, asked for new business on the agenda, Doug Gilpin of TV introduced the issue of the county funding of fire departments. The facts (as I recall them) were that the county spent about $3 million funding the 28 separate fire departments in the county--one in TV and 27 others. TVFD got about $700,000 from the county, the other 27 got about $$2.3 million. When the sources of county tax revenues were considered, something a little less than 80% came from Villages taxpayers. So the "sources and uses" of who paid the taxes and who got the benefits were completely reversed. The Villages got back only a little more than one-third of the taxes we paid to the county.

But the story is better. It turns out that even with the underfunding, the public ratings of TV fire department by national agencies were among the best in the country, well above any other department in the county. And, the new Villages commissioners had done a study that the county could be properly protected with significantly fewer than 28 separate fire departments--I think the national guidelines for proper coverage suggested that something like seven properly-equipped and manned fire departments would provide adequate protection.

So, the new Villages commissioners offered a proposal that the 28 fire protection districts in the county be reduced to two--one for TV and another for the rest of the county. Further, the proposal was that funding of the two new districts come from the areas protected--we'll pay for ours, the rest of the county pays for theirs. After initial wailing and moaning by the good old boys, they had some discussion wherein one observed, "But with that plan, we'll have to shut down a great many fire departments." The Villages representatives replied..."Exactly."

Frankly, I don't know how all this ever turned out. The proposal might not have been passed. But I think a tone was set from the beginning that more fiscal discipline was needed in the county. Since then many public works projects have been completed and are underway and our real estate taxes have actually decreased fairly substantially two years in a row. Even with the rapid growth of TV and increased tax revenues, that never happened before One Sumter. From all that I have read and all that I can see when traveling around the county, this place is very well managed. Is The Villages viewed as the Evil Empire by old time residents? Sure. But when someone comes in and changes your bucolic farm and ranch community to the "big city", that's probably unavoidable. The increase in jobs and average income gets ignored, but that's probably to be expected, as well.

Hmmm, maybe we ought to send some of our commissioners to Washington. If we could keep the special interest lobbyists away from them, the One Sumter approach might work better there too.