This is a very conservative, anti-tax city. There are lots of people who believe that government should only provide was is absolutely necessary. It will be interesting to see if any minds change now that they have cut public services so deeply.
Up to 10,000 street lights (out of 22,000 total) will be put out.
“The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops…”
"The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.
Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces…"
"Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.
City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving…"
Fascinating. Knowing next-to-nothing about Colorado Springs, I’ll ask: will it be legitimate to see its immediate future as a case study in eliminating government?
The article was pretty light on budget specifics (not surprising, as I suspect many readers are local and are at least somewhat familiar with the situation). I’m curious about this, though:
Not to defend salaries of Colorado Springs government workers, but really? Surely there’s a pretty wide disparity between the education/responsibility of the government workers (e.g., middle managers) and luxury resort employees…isn’t there?
It’s just my experience but it seems like in cases like this many peoples definition of “absolutely necessary” is quite flexible (as in, if I don’t need it at the time it’s not absolutly necessary, but if at some point in the future…)
As a resident of Colorado Springs I find this a bit frightening. The city has a large number of parks that lots of people use. I think it’s important to preserve them, and that takes a lot of effort/time/money in the high, dry atmosphere there. The roads are already in poor shape, and I don’t look forward to them getting worse.
The amazing thing is that my property taxes are already significantly lower than most of the rest of the country (comparing to places that have property taxes).
I think a lot of the increased taxes fail to pass with the electorate because they don’t have clear objectives and limits in place. A few years ago a 1% sales tax increase passed. I think this was due to the face that the projects it would be funding were specifically called out and there was a 10-year sunset on it.
The attitude is baffling to me. I know several people that will immediately eschew the thought of a tax increase, but those same people always use the city parks, roads, complain about traffic problems, etc. In my opinion, the city is already running pretty lean, and I don’t think it can get cut much more without causing significant impacts on the quality of life (another thing that everyone here likes to brag about!).
You have my sympatheties, EnginNerd. My friends in the Springs are pretty frightened, too.
Although this is going to sound heartless, it’s not meant to be in any way. I think this situation might serve as a perfect laboratory to test out some of the conservative and/or Republican beliefs and policies on taxes and government spending. Since one of the mantras of certain of the followers of that philosophy is “starve the beast” (or as Grover Norquist wishes, reduce the size of government so that it can be drowned in a bathtub), we’ll get to see what happens when such a philosophy is actually practiced on a small scale.
Colorado Springs may evolve into some sort of post-apocalyptic scenario, with gangs of well-armed citizens taking over protection of their own neighborhoods in the absence of police services, or starting up their own volunteer fire brigades in which they extort protection money from the community Or perhaps they’ll band together and use their own water and their own lawn equipment to care for parks.
Or, we get to see whether or not the conservative ideology holds water - if government is forced to downsize, perhaps it will become apparent that there is value to not funding parks, roadways, public recreation centers, public transportation, public libraries, etc.
Sadly, however, I feel this
is more likely to occur. People will complain about the filth, the traffic, the lack of decent public spaces, but be unable to put together those conditions with the lack of tax revenue.
Or perhaps they’ll band together and use their own water and their own lawn equipment to care for parks.