The season is upon us and all the tax-hike supporters and apologists have taken to the PR circuit in support of yet-another-Dunwoody-tax-hike. A city PRopagandist dares anyone to find another city with this millage rate. One of the dwarfs touts the great value this city offers, suggesting that may accrue to residents. But maybe not.
Both beg the question: what is value? In the real world, outside the distorting lens of self-serving politics, value is getting a good or service at a reasonable price to the buyer and one that supports the ongoing operation of the provider. Not cancerous metastatic growth, but sustainable operations. So given that tax hikes and uncontrolled bureaucratic growth has been a plague upon us since the very beginning, what do we, the mere residents of Dunwoody get in return?
We might start with the three P's, the bedrock from which the pro-city fundamentalists screamed their message of fire and brimstone, of hellfire and damnation should we not all line up in support of this faux neo-city. You may have noticed the pavement work on Mt Vernon in the Village. Again. All because city bureaucrats couldn't resist meddling in the engineering work done in the original effort. Is that value? Maybe parks? Well, if you consider paving an interstate lane of concrete through a natural setting aligned with leave-no-trace or a good use of money then you might see value. If you look real hard. Then there is the dumpster-fire called the Dunwoody Police Department. Is an endless string of lawsuits, inevitably settled at great cost, currently running into the millions of dollars a "great value?" Is a police chief stating, in discoverable emails, that enforcing traffic laws in our communities "isn't worth the cost" what residents would consider value? Is allowing that yahoo to cling to his job until the end of the year just so he can retire with full benefits any real value to residents?
Then we have the supply side. While the city bloats its headcount, absorbing functions (e.g., Chamber of Commerce) that rightly belong far outside city hall, they are handing out millions of dollars to powerful developers. This is done by way of tax exemptions. That's right. While we mere residents have seen nothing but year over year tax increases, crony capitalism ensures that developers won't pay a dime.
Is that what these yahoos call "value?" Maybe they think the folks who live in this city are as clueless, as detached from reality as they are. Their only problem is that we actually see our tax bills because we have to pay them.
Posts
