This guy sounds a lot like the Executive of the county I live in. He recently suggested another tax to help the homeless, the voters of the county passed a 175 million dollar referendum to help the homeless a couple years ago. How he wants 2 billion more. Of course, most politicians don’t tell you what things like this will cost you overall, they give the value in a small bit size piece. He says this will only cost the average homeowner $4 per year per $1000 valuation of your home. For me, that will cost me $2,160 a year, that will be about a 22% increase in my property taxes. I did the math and sent him an email asking how someone like me on a limited income is suppose to afford that tax increase. The canned response basically suggested I move to a cheaper county and let someone that can afford those taxes buy my house. If you took that 2 billion and divided it between all the homeless in our county, that would be almost $50,000 each. Someone is making a lot of money off the taxpayers and you can bet your ass it won’t be the homeless.
Oh, I didn’t think about it that way. I’ve never had any reason to try to contact municipal officials, but county commissioners, yes, and they’ve always been helpful, even if it wasn’t officially “their problem to worry about”, they were able to tell me who I needed to contact. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever dealt with a lackey* when I thought I needed to call a county official.
*by lackey I mean someone who shuffles responsibility up, orders down and tell you no regardless what the question is
Another Canadian, and I fully agree. I’ve gone to the office of my federal MP for help on a federal government matter, and to my provincial MPP on a provincial government matter. I never met the actual representative but in both cases the staff were extremely helpful. Things that were deemed “impossible” suddenly became possible and got done. The involvement of an MP/MPP’s office does carry a lot of weight and also shows the bureaucrats that the person they’re jerking around is serious.
Congressional staffers can be efficient and helpful, or they can be jerks.
Around 15 years ago we contacted our Congresswoman’s office to see if they had last minute availability for a White House tour. The website said to put in the request a month ahead but this was a spur of the moment trip so we were just a week out. A friendly helpful staffer made it happen and told us we were welcome to come in to the Congressional offices and to join a tour there as well.
So we went to our representative’s office, us and our kids, and another family with young kids. One of the staffers greeted us and showed us around the office, pointing out our congresswoman’s awards and items showing her initiatives. The mom from the other family said to the young kids “Maybe one of you will be our member of Congress when you grow up?” Staffer frowned angrily and scolded her, saying “No, we already have a congresswoman, Ms. X!” We were very annoyed at what a jerk he was–didn’t he realize that we were talking about 30-40 years in the future? Did he expect Ms. X, already 65, to be in Congress until she was 100?
Our family farm sits on the Minnesota/South Dakota state line, but our address was in South Dakota. The problem was our mailbox was in Minnesota, about half a mile down the gravel road. My mother wanted it moved, but kept getting a runaround because neither post office wanted to sign off on the paperwork. She wrote to our US Senator who promptly cut through the red tape and the box was moved.
This was awhile ago. My mother kept the letter, from George McGovern, who ran for president the next year. She thought it would become valuable when he won.
My only more recent interaction was with our representive to get White House tickets a few years ago. They were glad to help, and one of the staffers gave us a guided tour of the Capitol, including the chambers and the tunnel to their office building; it was a very good tour. It might have been because he went to our church, serving as an usher, and kind of knew us. (When he was away, the janitor from my office was the usher…)