Could metro government mean the end of Charleston’s user fee?
Very possibly.
At a July reception, representatives of various governments in Kanawha County had a chance to ask Louisville, Ky., Mayor Jerry Abramson how his community handled various problems when merging city and county governments in 2000.
Charleston City Manager David Molgaard, for example, asked about Charleston’s user fee, a $2 weekly deduction from every paycheck in the city.
If county residents formed a county-wide council, it could easily “vote the user fee out of existence,” Molgaard said.
“You may have to restructure your finances,” Abramson said. “You can let that kill it [metro government], or you can noodle on it a bit.”
The goal, Abramson said, is to identify everyone’s needs and concerns, and then address them. If the rest of the county would not support that fee, then the new government should be designed without it.
Meanwhile, at a recent meeting of Charleston’s Metro Government Committee, city council members were told that the fees city residents pay for certain services, such as garbage and fire protection, do not completely cover the costs of those services.
Garbage service, for example, costs $1.6 million more than Charleston residents pay in city refuse fees. The city uses tax money to make up the difference.
That means, if a community next door to Charleston wanted to pay to engage the city’s services, it would not be simply a matter of charging current fees of those new customers.
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Did I just see Mr. Abramson say…”a ‘new’ government?” What is this “new” government? Lately, President Obama has his administration especially the EPA people talking about building housing and wanting citizens moving closer into cities rather than all sprawled out in rural communities. Claiming “savings on gas and shorter trips to work, blah…blah…blah and on and on.” We should be watching this closely and see what the ‘agenda’ really is. Not much is being said on this but check out the new bills from EPA and the czars take on individual rural citizens and raising ones own food in gardens. Interesting and mysterious ideas coming from them on this.
Think of your new government as a milking machine. It sucks money from the county to improve the inner city. They tear down the projects, build subsidized housing in your neighborhood, fill that housing with the project people, then build homes downtown for liberal elite professionals. There will also be numerous creations for their entertainment. Regulations , where everything worked well before, become a source of revenue for the inner city. Neighborhoods between the city and suburbs fill up with illegal aliens to take advantage of the welfare creations new revenue provides. You’ll get some parks that close whenever there’s a budget crunch that endangers the aliens services or sub housing. City residents receive the same services which you’ll still pay for. If there is federal cleanup money for a disaster cleanup you’ll pay, city residents ride free, and the general fund sucks up the fed money. The residents of the city get to vote on what they already have with the exception that when passed, they can reach into county resident’s pockets. County residents get to live with the lie that bigger government will benefit them.