Fort Collins Now
August 2007
Tuesday night, the Fort Collins City Council is going to vote to put a new tax on the November ballot. This new tax will raise $1.1 million for “creating and promoting a healthy and sustainable environment.”
It’s the Million-Dollar Environmental Tax. It’s going to find new and innovative ways to spend your money to tell you how to curb your emissions and be good recyclers. There are no specifics. There is no sunset provision. City Council can’t reallocate this money if we face a future budget crunch.
The Million-Dollar Environmental Tax is a blank check from you, the taxpayers, payable to the environmental bureaucracy, in the amount of $1.1 million per year (or more, as our tax base grows), forever.
Wait. You didn’t hear about the Million-Dollar Environmental Tax? All you’ve read about is this new proposal to hire more police officers and firefighters?
Anyone who comes to you and proclaims that we need a new tax to fund a pressing need for improved police and fire protection – without mentioning how the rest of your money is going to spent – is only being selectively truthful. Don’t be fooled by those who will try to sell this simply as a “more cops” measure. City Council is asking for a quarter-cent sales tax hike, which will bring in $5.5 million each year. Of that, $3.3 million will go towards new police hiring, $1.1 million towards the Poudre Fire Authority, and $1.1 million towards ways to “protect and improve our clean air, clean water and healthy environment.”
How ways to “protect and improve our clean air, clean water and healthy environment” got attached to a police and fire measure, I’m not sure. Police officers, fire protection… and unspecified programs to “reduce energy consumption, increase recycling, reduce the production and storage of hazardous materials, and generally increase the environmental health of [our] homes and businesses.” According to this City Council, those items are like peas in a pod.
The only two Councilmembers to question this line of thinking were Diggs Brown and Wade Troxell. While both supported the concept of increasing our police and fire protection, Brown advocated for making police and fire a budget priority and Troxell questioned the environmental portion of this tax.
Now we can debate whether or not we need to raise more money for police and fire protection. The City Manager claims to have “objective data on public safety needs” – data that is “watertight.” (For some reason, the final report was not available to City Councilmembers on Tuesday. However, it would be interesting to see if the report considered the fact that our crime rate has actually been decreasing over the past five years.)
But, for the sake of discussion, let’s assume that we do need increased police and fire protection and that our city is so cash-strapped (“about as lean as it can get,” according to the City Manager) that we need a tax increase. Why the environmental programs? Does the City Manager have “objective data” proving that new programs to improve our air are a “pressing need?” (He didn’t say last night.)
It gets worse.
There was an odd exchange towards the end of the discussion on Tuesday night when the City Manager admitted: “This is not completely solving the problem” of police and fire protection. So, according to the City Manager, the pressing “need” is so great that we need higher taxes, but apparently not so pressing that we can’t divert some of those higher taxes for feel-good environmental programs.
If there is such a need for more police and fire, and the $4.4 million in this measure doesn’t completely meet that need, why is the remaining $1.1 million going to environmental programs? That lack of priorities makes it hard to take this so-called “crisis” seriously.
This is an age-old script. Declare an urgent need and then bundle in a load of non-essential programs. In Washington, they call that pork. Wouldn’t you know it, City Councilmember Kelly Ohlson adamantly defended the Million-Dollar Environmental Tax, calling it the “sizzle.”
Isn’t “sizzle” the sound pork makes when it hits the frying pan?
August 2007
Tuesday night, the Fort Collins City Council is going to vote to put a new tax on the November ballot. This new tax will raise $1.1 million for “creating and promoting a healthy and sustainable environment.”
It’s the Million-Dollar Environmental Tax. It’s going to find new and innovative ways to spend your money to tell you how to curb your emissions and be good recyclers. There are no specifics. There is no sunset provision. City Council can’t reallocate this money if we face a future budget crunch.
The Million-Dollar Environmental Tax is a blank check from you, the taxpayers, payable to the environmental bureaucracy, in the amount of $1.1 million per year (or more, as our tax base grows), forever.
Wait. You didn’t hear about the Million-Dollar Environmental Tax? All you’ve read about is this new proposal to hire more police officers and firefighters?
Anyone who comes to you and proclaims that we need a new tax to fund a pressing need for improved police and fire protection – without mentioning how the rest of your money is going to spent – is only being selectively truthful. Don’t be fooled by those who will try to sell this simply as a “more cops” measure. City Council is asking for a quarter-cent sales tax hike, which will bring in $5.5 million each year. Of that, $3.3 million will go towards new police hiring, $1.1 million towards the Poudre Fire Authority, and $1.1 million towards ways to “protect and improve our clean air, clean water and healthy environment.”
How ways to “protect and improve our clean air, clean water and healthy environment” got attached to a police and fire measure, I’m not sure. Police officers, fire protection… and unspecified programs to “reduce energy consumption, increase recycling, reduce the production and storage of hazardous materials, and generally increase the environmental health of [our] homes and businesses.” According to this City Council, those items are like peas in a pod.
The only two Councilmembers to question this line of thinking were Diggs Brown and Wade Troxell. While both supported the concept of increasing our police and fire protection, Brown advocated for making police and fire a budget priority and Troxell questioned the environmental portion of this tax.
Now we can debate whether or not we need to raise more money for police and fire protection. The City Manager claims to have “objective data on public safety needs” – data that is “watertight.” (For some reason, the final report was not available to City Councilmembers on Tuesday. However, it would be interesting to see if the report considered the fact that our crime rate has actually been decreasing over the past five years.)
But, for the sake of discussion, let’s assume that we do need increased police and fire protection and that our city is so cash-strapped (“about as lean as it can get,” according to the City Manager) that we need a tax increase. Why the environmental programs? Does the City Manager have “objective data” proving that new programs to improve our air are a “pressing need?” (He didn’t say last night.)
It gets worse.
There was an odd exchange towards the end of the discussion on Tuesday night when the City Manager admitted: “This is not completely solving the problem” of police and fire protection. So, according to the City Manager, the pressing “need” is so great that we need higher taxes, but apparently not so pressing that we can’t divert some of those higher taxes for feel-good environmental programs.
If there is such a need for more police and fire, and the $4.4 million in this measure doesn’t completely meet that need, why is the remaining $1.1 million going to environmental programs? That lack of priorities makes it hard to take this so-called “crisis” seriously.
This is an age-old script. Declare an urgent need and then bundle in a load of non-essential programs. In Washington, they call that pork. Wouldn’t you know it, City Councilmember Kelly Ohlson adamantly defended the Million-Dollar Environmental Tax, calling it the “sizzle.”
Isn’t “sizzle” the sound pork makes when it hits the frying pan?
