Archive for the 'Municipalities' Category

Date: September 14th, 2008, Filed under Municipalities

Chicago, IL

By A.B. Dada

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A good friend emailed me a link from CNN about the City of Chicago begging Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich to declare Chicago a disaster area due to the worst rain in 137 years.  The friend, recently introduced to my tirades on government ineptitude, asks succinctly, “I’m so frustrated trying to understand this. It’s not just me, right??”

No, it’s just not right, but there’s nothing to understand.  This is how government works.

Think, for a moment, of any situation where the government provides a service in a similar way to a private business or person.  The lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles versus the lines at Best Buy at Christmas.  Best Buy clears out quicker.  How about building public infrastructure against weather versus building private infrastructure against the same weather?

In the first comparison, government is under intense pressure to never serve efficiently.  If they did, they’d see budget cuts.  If they just underserve, they’ll be able to request more money to serve better in the future.  You see this at your various Departments of Motors Vehicles, you see this in public education.  Always try to aim for a C-average, so you can ask for more money next year.  Agencies that get A’s in service surely can’t ask for more money to do better.

In the second comparison, you have two parties with different needs: a private business has to watch their bottom line as the only way to pay for expensive future repairs is to raise rates or cut profits.  A public entity can just raise taxes or fees and those the public “serves” can do almost nothing about it.

In the City of Chicago’s case, they have many avenues to try to seek repair money for their inept management of the drain system:

1. Raise taxes
2. Ask for State help
3. Ask for Federal help

If they raise taxes, the voting citizens might have a beef.  Might.  With City recently raising sales tax to 10.25%, they seem to have accomplished their task without as much outcry as expected.  In the case of the flooding caused directly by not designing the system to handle events that have happened in the past, they are better off asking the State for money.  That money will still come from taxpayers, but not from taxpayers who have any say in voting for City officials.

This is how the system works.  Build an infrastructure that generally seems to work, and when it fails, ask for money.  If they built a system that did work, as millions of private businesses and individuals have done, the City is best suited by faking it, and when their underbuilt system fails, they can cry to foreign taxpayers for money.

What’s worse, the Governor will likely grant this Relief Declaration, because a few million here and there will only cost the average Illinois taxpayer a few extra dollars next year.  Will you complain about an extra $2 out of your paycheck next year, just a measly 1 cent per day increase?  No.  For you to waste even half an hour to complain would cost you way more than the tax will.  You’ll get a bit peeved for five minutes, and then you’ll get back to how you’ll pay your mortgage or health care next month.  Of course, that $2 isn’t a unique hit to your family’s money, because those $2 hits come over and over and over.  $2 out of your pocket for Chicago drainage repair, $2 out of your pocket for bridges to be repaired in Minnesota, $2 out of your pocket for repairing a road the U.S. military blew up in Iraq, $2 out of your pocket for foreign aid to the Congo, $2 out of your pocket to underpriviledged children in New Zealand, who knows?

You won’t fight over $2, or $10, or $200 because you can’t.  On the other hand, you have hundreds of thousands of individuals working as lobbyists whose sole purpose it is to extract those $2 fees, but only focus on one fee.  When a lobbyist knows they can extra just 50 cents a year out of a taxpayer, they know they’ll take in $150 million in total.  For them to work hard to get that money is easy.  For you to fight them is impossible.  You can’t do it.  I can’t do it.  We’d rather pay the 50 cents than try to fight it off, and they’re happily reaping $150 million for their client.

Should you, probably not a City of Chicago taxpayer, care about Chicago residents?  Maybe, but if you do, send an individual you know in Chicago a few bucks to pay for an extra sump pump.  What about Louisiana or Texans who are put out by hurricans?  Our “foreign” tax dollars are giving them incentive to stay, when the reasonable response to Katrina or Ike is to pack up and move.  Those same tax dollars are being picked at by thousands of government vultures, used to protect their positions, take care of cronies doing shoddy work (maybe building subpar drainage systems), and living high on the hog.  You’re not going to take even one minute to complain about the 50 cents or even 5 cents that the City of Chicago request MIGHT cost you next year (and ever year after), but you better believe that the powers that be in Chicago WILL fight for a bailout.

The best solution is to demand that your elected officials stop bailing out ANYONE.  It won’t work, because no candidate ever runs for office on the “We don’t care about anyone but us ticket.”  Maybe they should.

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