The City of Asheville has put some staff reports online pertaining to budget discussions. It provides an opportunity to discuss recurring irritants. This post pertains only to priorities for capital investment.
- Some people do not have the capacity to comprehend budgets in terms of seven-digit line items. Granted, those in elective office can look at a pie chart that reads, “bridge replacement 43%, retaining wall projects 14%,” etc. and see off the bat that a 7% savings could be realized by switching from Pratt trusses to Warren trusses on three of the smaller bridges, and that no efficiencies would be lost by scaling down the size of the I-beams specified by the engineer. Silly mortals, on the other hand, ask, “What bridges need repairs? I haven’t seen any washed out.”
Though unable to see behind multimillion-dollar line items and intentional obfuscation, mere mortals might question a pie chart showing repairs to the exterior of Asheville’s beautiful pink palace, otherwise known as city hall, comprise 76% ($5,550,000) of the building and facilities budget for the next year. Are ye gads in high office really worth the extra bricks and mortar? They already get well over 800 times the police protection of the average mere mortal.
- Industry has just about left the area. To get rid of those clingons who haven’t taken a hint, who perhaps unable to afford a move to India have not even taken the initiative to move to Tennessee, the city proposes raising water rates 1.27% on low-level users and 19.86% on big users. Asheville wants affordable, infill housing, but it wants to raise water rates on multifamily units 3.57% while leaving single-family residential rates flat. Wholesale customers, who mostly do not live in the city, will experience a rate increase as well. The strategy appears to be shoot to kill anybody using municipal water who can’t vote in Asheville City Council elections, and feign the consequences were unintended later.
As another irony, everybody talks about keeping Asheville clean and green, but costs of using water for irrigation will be escalated.
- Transit advocates pressure council to invest more in buses. As has been repeated elsewhere, good transportation systems help people and products get where they need to go. With that in mind, Asheville will invest in security cameras for its buses. $225,000 will be spent on an automated vehicle location system. Evidently, buses are wandering off into pastures and running well over fifteen minutes behind schedule. If the bus is not late, riders by all means want to know where it is. Then, because less is more, and more is less, the city will host another fare-free weekend. Tales are still reverberating about the damage done to the buses from the party animals who took advantage of the last fare-free program, but that does not conform to our vision of a green society, so let’s stuff it under the bed (to avoid the obvious metaphor).
- Golf revenues are down, and so this essential city service will need $150,000 to $200,000 from the city’s general fund. As you know, golf is one of the protected rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States and Declaration of Independence, and a lack of access to subsidized golf could cramp the style of city council members who use the course to fight the obesity crisis and keep up their networks.
- One wonders how many people out there are driving vehicles that do not have some form of dangling deferred maintenance. Just listen to them as they drive by. Government is one of few entities that can afford to perform scheduled maintenance on its fleet because taxpayers are giving it the money they would have spent repairing their own vehicles.
- The city has to replace metal traffic signal poles at two intersections. The cost will be $120,000. It is unclear from the sketchy information whether or not these are the fluted, Asheville green, designer poles with bold and articulated bases and lilted arms the city purchased recently, or horrible monstrosities that create no sense of place.
- Asheville is broke, but it has $201,260 to install Streetline Smart Parking installations, $300,000 for Civic Center renovations, and $75,000 for Urban Trail maintenance.
The city didn’t have $1.45 million for 1.5 miles of greenway, so it borrowed the money. And, as we all know, if the city can default on the loan, the money will be freeeee! Otherwise, taxes might go up, but only a right-wing hate-speaker would try to associate the increase with debt service.
- In recent years, the City of Asheville has invested in the construction of two sidewalk projects that required retaining walls that in former years were considered financially-unfeasible. So, when governments started going in debt and borrowing from each other to pay each others’ debts, the city finally found the resources to undertake the projects. (Why does the name Kip Chalmers come to mind?)
- When all is said and done, the evil taxpayers left insufficient contributions to cover multimodal projects and alleged financial mismanagement of Pack Place.
