A Nickel’s Worth of Free Advice for Huntington Mayor Updike
Posted by Jeff Pruitt - 3/7/10 @ 2:45 pm - Filed Under Local Politics
When the JG’s Tracy Warner comes to talk austerity measures for your city - well the best thing you can do is politely decline. Warner and the JG have championed every single tax increase proposed in the city of Fort Wayne and they are certainly no friends of fiscal discipline.
His column, which read as a plea from your administration to raise taxes, isn’t going to help. The people of Huntington are tapped out and they simply can’t afford to let you and your cronies tax them to oblivion to support more government jobs. So let me offer a few suggestions in place of your whining:
“But if you don’t have enough money to plow the streets, to pick up the garbage, if you don’t have enough firefighters to put out fires … where does it end?”
It ends where the taxpayers want it to end. And obviously they don’t want, or can’t afford, to pay anymore. Why does the city need to provide trash services in the first place? The entire city’s trash service should be privatized. This was the case in the city I grew up in with a population of over 400,000 and it worked just fine there. There’s obviously a market for trash service and a private company (or two) will fill the need. It will also likely do it more efficiently and the cost will be born by the users directly.
As for firefighters, more and more cities around the country are moving back to volunteer firehouses. Has Huntington considered this? If not, why not? According to the article, 15% of property tax payments are delinquent. Why not get some of these people to pay their debts by plowing the streets, hauling garbage or volunteering at a firehouse?
You might be surprised at how much people are willing to chip in when they can see the results and it doesn’t go to an ever-increasing black-hole of government spending…
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I agree wholeheartedly. Although mainstream America has truly become a cult of narcissism, constantly demanding instant gratification, one might be surprised just how many willing men and women are out there in society willing to lend a hand to help their fellow citizens. Volunteer firefighters are a staple of many of the world’s largest cities, and often outright the only line of defense for some of the smallest. I’m sure that firefighting, plowing, and so on could easily be deferred just by asking for help.
The problem is government has become so bloated and authoritative that asking for help from its citizens to defer costs is seen as “weak” and raising taxes and fees is seen as the only means to an end. It’s quite sad to think that the days when the elected and their constituents worked together to create a safe, independent, and livable community for everyone are long over. Now are only left the days when the elected vie for as much power as they can while leaving their promises in the dust, knowing that their constituencies will continue to elect them over and over as the lesser of two evils.