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Posted by D Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Thursday, July 14, 2011 at 12:25:50 :
In Reply to: Re: "Social architecture" posted by Glen Id [70.41.247.101] on Thursday, July 14, 2011 at 10:11:37 :
Get involved in that sort of political stuff is probably the last thing any of us wants to do. It's tedious, it's frustrating, and you end up shaking hands with men who are so slimy you want to go wash your hand as soon as you're done. I stick my nose into politics too, from time to time, but there's nothing the least bit fun about it. The trouble is most good folks are too busy trying to earn a living, raise their kids right, and maybe have a little fun from time to time, to go to all those commission and council meetings, write letters, figure out who's really got pull where, and deal with people who will look you straight in the eye, shake your hand firmly, and lie through their teeth.
Fire districts can be a real license to steal. I think we're fortunate here that it's still mostly a volunteer department run by some penny-pinching old timers. I have yet to see a new fire house in a city of any size that wasn't an absolute Taj Mahal. When I lived in Everett, they passed a bond for the fire department (of course it passed; everybody likes firemen) and built a set of the fanciest fire houses I ever saw until I saw the new one in Moscow, which was the fanciest I'd seen until I saw the new one on the res just north of the Indian gambling ca-sino.
$240/100K is HUGE. I've never even seen a school levy that high. Around here, the total tax bill on a $100K house is about $1500, so that would be a 15% increase. And for what? Houses almost never burn to the ground these days, and when they do it's usually in places where nobody was around and the fire was roaring by the time anybody noticed it. No doubt some of that money was for EMS, but even so, unless somebody happens to be around to see me have a stroke or a heart attack, and some first-rate medics can to working on me within 5 minutes, I'm dead. In any sort of rural area, that just ain't gonna happen.
I know when they pitch these things they say that a better fire rating will lower your insurance. It's never nearly enough to pay for the tax increase, though. I own a commercial building that's spriklerized. I pay $43/mo for standby water for the sprinkler system. My insurance agent says the sprinklers reduce my insurance premium by about $300/year. Do the math. I'd save money the first year by disconnecting the sprinklers and paying more for insurance.
Anyway, I'm glad you fought this big money grab. On the coast, they have an even worse boondoggle called "port districts". I watched them inside and out while I lived in Everett, and if that isn't a license to steal, nothing is. They get all the benefits of government in term of being able to tax an being able to acquire "surplus" property for next to nothing, while paying no taxes on it (so they can build an empire of prime waterfront property covered with bare dirt and weeds, with cyclone fences around it), and yet they also manage to keep all the benefits of a private operation in terms of having no meaningful public access to their records or their books, and no viable opposition to the lifetime re-election of their commissioners.