windstrider: Seriously. We hear all the time that public sector employees make too much money compared to their private sector counterparts, but is that truly the case in Colorado Springs? Are the city government employees making too much money?

The ones who are disconnecting streetlights are. Disconnecting the lights is probably costing the city as much as it would to keep running the lights for six months.

I don't understand. CS was the mecca for the ultra-right.

Surely Focus on the Family is rolling in dough and can bail out the city.
Isn't that what Jesus would do?

Can't the rest of the religious right come in and buy all the overpriced real estate
to help them out? What about the teabaggers?

How about a BAKE SALE?

For all the crap Aurora gets, this makes me laugh. Aurora anticipated budget issues years ago and started making adjustments then. Granted, we still have some issues, but they're not turning off the street lights and our parks are pretty darn nice.

COSprings could be a nice town but nobody wants to pay taxes, so even the roads are kinda shiatty. This town isn't 100% evangelical libertarian though, there are a fair number of hippies and liberals. They came out in force for the last presidential election but appear to have been completely passive during the last ballot referendum.

Of course what the national media isn't saying so much is that we're all pissed off at the corrupt mayor's shenanigans with the US Olympic Committee. even as a namby pamby liberal type I don't care about the damn USOC. Tourists will always come here for the views.

Molavian: Trained cops? The average cop puts a magazine downrange once a year to qualify. Their safety lies in numbers. Many "yokels" are military-trained combat veterans.

Have you thought this plan all the way through?

Funny, I just put 12 magazines through two guns for quarterly qualification two days ago. I would wager that cops are far better trained in firearms skills than any military veteran.

I live in Colorado Springs, so I'm really getting a kick...

Part of the problem with the proposal which was voted down is that it was never-ending. The economy is down, so sales tax collection and property taxes are down. But the proposal didn't take that into account. It was a permanent raise in personal property taxes (iirc, businesses were exempted) - it gave the city counsel more money forever, and that just isn't going to fly here. No matter how you cut it, it was a power/money grab.

Other problems include having a city manager (she's the one in charge overseeing how the money is spent) having her own house upside down & in foreclosure in California. People thought. "if she can't manage her own money, how can she manage ours"? There have been problems with spending tons of cash on new vehicles, the police helicopters, sweetheart power rates for various businesses (the city runs the utilities company), the USOC deal, etc. The mayor was accused of malfeasance at one point, a good number of the city counsel members are in the back pocket of Focus on the Family, etc. People don't trust city counsel for a number of reasons, some of which are entirely valid.

Additionally, the police are paid at a rate which is higher than the NYPD, and so on. That one doesn't bother me so much, because we have fewer police officers per 1000 residents, and I'm sure they work for the money. But since I wasn't the only one voting, I know it made a difference. For the record, even with fewer officers, we have a lower crime rate than most comparable cities. City workers are paid at or near the top of the scale, too.

Finally, the way the proposal was structured was flat out dumb. It should have been a sales tax. Instead, the burden would have been on homeowners through property tax. At a time when foreclosures are up everywhere, and some people are barely making it, "Let's raise property taxes to pay for the parks. Yeah, some people may lose their houses, but look - we'll have nice green grass!" wasn't going to cut it.

Could I afford it? Yes. Could most people afford it? Probably. But some couldn't, and many were unwilling to effectively evict their neighbors so that the fountains at the park run this summer.

Members of city counsel (who wrote the proposal and didn't have any sort of backup) were essentially saying that the citizens either had to take it in the pants or be punished with deep cuts everywhere. People had had enough, didn't trust the counsel at all, &; essentially told the counsel that they'd rather do without than fund more waste, graft, and excess.

/rant off/

And yes I too am sick of Doug Bruce.

I met a public librarian from Ohio this summer and she was saying Colorado (specifically TABOR) was being held up as an example of what to be afraid of.

<b><a href="http://www.fark.com/cgi/comments.pl?IDLink=5025050&IDComment=58189774#c581 89774" target="_blank">jankyboy</a>:</b> <i>I would certainly favor slightly higher taxes if we had a city council and mayor who wouldn't just flush it down the toilet. I'm still bitter they spent $32M of our tax dollars to keep the USOC here. The other day I read we're still on the hook for another $4M, too. Super!</i>

This.

The USOC deal is the gift that keeps on giving. Other things that suck include:
* A mayor who is so cozy with FotF that he refuses to issue a "welcome" to the Pride Parade every year, even though it's done for literally every single other event held on city property. Plus, he looks like the Joker from the Batman comics without makeup. I expect the Penguin to walk by every time I see his face on TV.
* City counsel spending money on stuff that they already know the answer to. Like: "Let's $tudy whether we can charge money to access Garden of the Gods Park. Hmmmmmm. It says here that we can't, since it was in the charter documents when we accepted the land about several decades ago. Wow. That's just like last time we paid to study this. Five years down the road, lets spend money to look at this again". Lather, rinse repeat.
* Let's blow a wad on allowing big businesses (but not individuals or small businesses) to get deep price breaks on their utilities if they'll agree to occasional power interruptions (which have never actually happened).

<i>This city absolutely sucks ass. Our city government appears uninterested in attracting companies that bring along high paying jobs, the infrastructure is about 20 years behind the times, and they don't seem to put any limits on city expansion. I wish the military would move out to just to twist the knife a little more.</i>

This is another thing - city residents are paying for <i>massive</i> infrastructure expansion out east (the new suburbs, all of which are build by giant corporations) while the core of the city gets nearly squat. In essence, we're all subsidizing the construction of roads, utilities, etc, to upper middle class (and higher) people who move east of Powers Blvd., and the builders who are building the houses. All this serves to make massive suburban blight affordable to those who could already well afford it at the expense of those who can't.

Yume no Hikari: Am I the only person in Colorado who's really sick of Douglas Bruce flapping his gums? He wrote a ballot initiative that's singlehandedly screwed over local governments statewide and set the pattern for similar measures across the country, and for this he gets to run off his mouth on NPR?

Yeah, until he points out that the city/county/state/whatever didn't go through the proper steps to raise taxes for stuff. Like the waste water "fee" in El Paso County. It looked like a tax, it was structured like a tax (based on the size of your property and the size of any buildings), you paid it like a tax (only property owners owed it, instead of everyone), but by calling it a "fee" they thought they'd get out of having to raise taxes as the law allowed.

People like Doug Bruce serve a necessary purpose when they make the city/county/state/whatever adhere to the law as written. That isn't a bad thing.

Making elected officials follow the laws is a Good Thing, even if we don't agree with the specific law. Having someone, even a PITA remind them that they aren't above the laws that govern the rest of us is laudable.

And, if we don't like TABOR (the Doug Bruce authored Taxpayers Bill of Rights (pops to the Wiki), we can remove it with the same mechanism which put it in (by amending Article X of the State Constitution).

/1992: the year Colorado Springs screwed us all
//between TABOR and Will Perkins' anti-gay idiocy

Out of that hateful, prejudicial crap sprung wonderful things like the Gill Foundation and the smack-down of Amendment 2 by the US Supreme Court.

JDD: Services are not what needs to be cut in economic crisis, every municipality has fat to trim. The reason they cut services is so there is a rally cry for the tax increase crowd. "oh no, there's garbage in the park! we have to raise taxes, stat!" Services and education are the pawns in the tax game.

Here in Oregon, we just passed two tax increase measures (during a recession) to close a 780 million dollar budget shortfall with the battle cry of "think of the children!". Less than a month later, they announced approval of SIX HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS in new bike paths in Portland. This is worth getting "bootstrappy" about.

Well, this. When you talk about turning off streetlights, it makes me wonder what the budget is getting spent on that's more important.

(Admittedly, it *could* be stuff that really really is more important and can't be cut)

Loren: There are a *LOT* of bubbles of fat. Generally they manage to look productive but have costs well in excess of what would be needed to produce the output.

One of the other heads the new mayor chopped off was the city solicitor who was contracting out way too much routine work to highly paid private companies instead of hiring one more staff attorney at half the price.

itazurakko:
Interesting - my area has similar issues. Lots of the new suburban residents (or surrounding small town residents, really, but they're the ones that moved there in the past 15 or so years and ALL to a man work in the urban main town, so hell yes they're suburbanites) complain about their county money funding stuff in the older parts of the city, without thinking about all the sewer taxes and what not that we central-area residents paid to make the opening up of their shiny new plastic 'burbs possible.

In Colorado Springs, the people who are paying for City Council to hand money to large corporations, wealthy builders and new homeowners (of large homes) are the people who live in the more established parts of town. It's like any other town - rich, middle class, and poor.

It isn't lost on some of us that there are no housing opportunities for poor people in any of that new construction. So, they get to pay to line the pockets of people who already have money, and would have paid the additional increase if it had passed, but they have less than no chance of living there, or for their kids to benefit from the new charter schools popping up in the area, or any of that.

All of which is why I find it hilarious that some are complaining that people are going to "suffer" because this didn't pass. Newsflash: people in some parts of town have old homes, roads and schools. The big difference now is that they aren't going to have to fund brand new homes, roads and schools for the middle and upper class.

The difference between here and anywhere else is this: Colorado is different from some places in that we never have enough water & are ruled by a multi-state water compact. We can't just "take" water out of the river and we can't take a single drop more than the city is entitled to. The fact that we don't have enough water should limit growth, but it doesn't, because City Council funds builders to keep the growth rate artificially high. It could not exist without taxpayer funding.

Getting water to people who wish to live in the suburbs way the heck out in the suburbs is an unbelievably expensive proposition - thousands and thousands of dollars per house - to the point that there are some small developments in the southern part of the county (which didn't have rich builders) who have never had water - going on several decades. Those people buy water in tanks & truck it to their property daily.

The idea that those people who've waited decades for water get to join the rest of us (who have to follow strict water rationing some years) in paying out the butt building stuff for people who can already afford it is an insult.

Anyone who looks at the tax issue ion Colorado Springs and feels bad for the poor people or because we won't have green grass in the park clearly doesn't understand how things work here.

Stop pouring money directly into the pockets of people who want big new houses in suburbia and the builders who build those houses. Then we can talk about a tax increase for parks, museums and so on.

The current budget model is to artificially grow grow grow, paid for by current taxpayers, instead of allowing what the market or circumstances allow.

If I sound liberal or all squishy for poor people... I'm not. I just don't see spending money to make wealthy people more wealthy and threatening everyone else with cuts to services to do so.

bunner: It's time to shake the Etch a Sketch. Time for jubilee. Or we can just keep pretending that nobody will ever call us on our fake economy and fake currency that we use to prop it up.

While I don't entirely agree with your argument, the locution "It's time to shake the Etch a Sketch" is a winning one. +1

FTFA:

"We've taken all the trash cans out. We're not going to be doing any litter collections in the parks," says Larry Small, vice mayor for Colorado Springs. "We're hoping the citizens will pack it out themselves."

HAAA! HAHAHAHAHAAAA! *gasp* Ahh-hahahahahahaaaa!

/they're so funny!
//they're serious!?