Why Governments Need Oversight
Duluth, Minnesota wants to charge people fees for using emergency services. Aren’t emergency services (the protection of life and property afforded by the government) pretty much the primary fucking reason people pay taxes? Seriously, Duluth, that’s messed up.
Sphere It
this is what happens when you have declining house values. It’s nasty underside of this catastrophe. Taxes for towns normally come from property taxes, and they base those on projections for the property values and expected growth in those values and how much more they’ll make from taxes. As you can imagine, the last few years has seen an uptake in growth in tax revenue, which has drive a growth in new services and updates to old ones (new fire engines/police cars, new buildings…) which since they are expensive, have been leased. now since revenue is down, they are trying to come up with creative ways to pay for them. oh, and of course you can’t drop the selectman’s cousin pay or fire him on the water ethics commission :).
Comment by chuck — July 21, 2008 @ 9:07 am