Your Tax Dollars Aren’t Paying Amarillo’s Jared Miller. So What Is?

The big news in Amarillo this week has been wrapped around the unanimous firing of City Manager Jared Miller. The news came down last week that they were going to be putting that to a vote, and that vote happened this week.

Miller was making around $300,000 a year as city manager, pretty good scratch for anyone. However, there are some complications and provisions inside his contract with the city.

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Namely the severance provision, which is going to send Miller on his way with a large sum of money in his pocket. Just how much you ask? How about a bit north of $730,000. Pretty solid severance if you ask me. Now comes the bigger question.

Where is the city going to find all this money to pay him? Is it going to come from tax dollars that we all pay? Well the answer there is no, and that seemingly relieved a lot of residents. Dig a little bit deeper though and it may just rile you right back up.

The money will be coming from the water and sewer enterprise fund. Now on the surface you may just go, oh ok, and move along. You do realize that fund is actually money that we pay to the city right? Seems to me that's the same as tax dollars.

There's a monthly fee on your water bill that goes into this fund, and it should be used on things such as improving Amarillo's water quality amongst other things. Instead, a huge chunk of money will be coming out of it to pay off Miller.

I only bring this up because in order to get the money back into that fund, the city officials will have to look at all the other different funds we dump money into and decide which one of those funds is the lowest priority to the city.

I'm not going to tell you how I feel about all this because at the end of the day, my opinion doesn't matter. I just wanted to point out that it feels like we're robbing Peter to pay Paul and ultimately affect the citizens of Amarillo.