Editor, the News-Herald:

We taxpayers should demand that city council give us a real property tax break now. They should adjust the tax rate from $1.08 per hundred to one dollar per hundred to account for the increased assessments on our property we have received over the past several years.

The city collected well over a million dollars too much in taxes from us last year, and chose not to adjust the tax rate, but said they would save it for us. I wonder, did they really save it for us or some other pet project that will only benefit a select few?

The city is not short of money. They continue to spend our tax money as if it were their own. The purchasing of the Obici Hospital property for $4.5 million and now the Planters Club for $1.2 million was an unnecessary expenditure. Tax money should only be spent on the needs of the citizens, not for speculation in the real estate market. I am still upset that this city continues to give our tax money to businesses downtown to improve the looks of those businesses. There should be a law to prevent city officials from using taxpayer money to benefit private businesses.

Senior citizens like myself should not have to give the city more than one of our social security checks each year. They are taking two of mine and working on the third one. Let’s limit property taxes on those of us who are over 65 and have owned our property for many years to no more than one of our pockets and keep their hands off our wallets, pocketbooks and checkbooks.

William Harward

Suffolk