By Thomas Warren III, Editor-in-Chief

For whatever reason, there seems to be one word in the English language that bureaucrats hate so much that they pretend it doesn’t even exist. That word is the dirtiest word in the dictionary of government — recession.

Observers recently saw the Biden administration’s botched explanation of the term “recession” to deny that the United States is in a recession (even though it is). The response from Team Biden was very bad on the recession question, but it appears that government’s rejection of the word exists at all levels, even at the local one.

During Tuesday’s meeting of the Amarillo City Council, City Councilman Cole Stanley questioned assistant city manager Laura Storrs regarding why city staff is asking the City Council to raise taxes for debt that has not yet been issued. Storrs tried hard to defend the proposal, while Stanley stood firm on seeking answers for why struggling taxpayers should be forced to pay for debt that has not even been issued. It was during this exchange that Stanley spoke a truth that appeared to make every bureaucrat in the room stick their fingers in their ears and act like nothing was being said.

“We are in a recession,” Stanley said.

It felt like you could hear all of the air suck out of the room when he said that. It was almost as if nobody in the audience from city staff could even believe that someone would utter those words. After all, the City of Amarillo for years has acted like recessions just don’t exist.

When the economy fell into a recession in 2020, the City Council pushed ahead with a debt issuance to build a water park, as well as a proposal for the largest tax-funded bond in Amarillo history.

Now, when the economy is once again in recession, the City Council is again pushing to make taxpayers pay up for a project that, ironically, was previously defeated during a previous recession.

When you’re in government, apparently recessions don’t exist. And that is a huge problem.

It’s time to change the culture in government and send our bureaucrats and elected officials on a one-way flight back to reality from whatever rainbow land they have been living in. That change can only happen if things change at the top, and they won’t change when we have government officials and elected officials who act like recessions don’t exist.

Again, it’s time for city manager Jared Miller, Mayor Ginger Nelson, and the rest of the Amarillo City Council — with the exception of Cole Stanley — to resign.