City Hall tax hike

It sounds like, thanks to the good people at City Hall, all the residents of our fair town are going to pay more taxes.

Why? Well, as the wise old man Keith Coombs confirmed for us back in September, City Hall does not work the same way as the rest of us.

While the real world looks at revenue and then adjusts expenses accordingly, City Hall looks at how much it wants to spend and then simply adjusts it's taxes to cover it.

In other words, revenue drives expenses.

And now the spendthrifts at the Gower Street bunker have hit the jackpot - a 23% average hike in assessments.

So if City Hall does nothing at at all, our collective taxes go up by a a quarter. It takes only simple arithmetic to figure out that, in order to be revenue neutral, the city needs to drop taxes from a mill rate of 12.7 down to roughly 10 mills.

But the city isn't going to do that.

Since Mile One Stadium Center has been doing so well, the city council has decided to reward that good behavior with a $500,000 increase in their annual take at the trough subsidy. If this is how it's going to work then let's hope they do a little less well next year - we can't afford much more of their success.

And because the city has been remiss in their ongoing management of Metrobus, that organization now find themselves with an old building full of old buses. Now that matter is coming home to roost.

So in the end, the city is going to try to hold on to as much of this windfall as they possibly can showing that they have no justification to call themselves prudent managers of our money.