| Up here in the sticks, our municipal leadership has been pretty good over the years at navigating through an increasingly failing model of funding local governments mostly brought on by elected state leadership that just cuts stuff. That's meant chopping down shared revenue for local governments, and appropriations for school districts and universities (and ignoring the Mackinac Center's lame attempts to label these direct appropriations as subsidies). Last year, I think I maybe mentioned that the city of Mount Pleasant is now considering one of two options: Raising local millage rates or instituting an income tax. Tonight, there's a hearing. A structural gap exists between revenues and expenditures in the City's general fund budget, largely due to more than 10 years of cuts in state funding. In order to stabilize the city's financial picture for the long-term, the City Commission is considering implementation of an income tax accompanied by a decrease in the property tax millage OR an increase in the city millage rate for 2014 and future years.
Last year, I wrote in a column for the local paper that this was being forced on the city not because our elected leaders want things like gold plated swingsets in our parks or police officers dressed in uniforms of the rarest of silks, but because of incompetent, short-sighted leadership in Lansing. In response, one of our local elected leaders, a fiscally conservative Republican, wrote to me to say that not only did he agree but that in conversations with our representative and senator that he got lip service but the impression that they just didn't get it. Both choices would dig directly into my pocket, by the way, and I'm a very poor person. I live and work in the city, so my paycheck would go down as a result, and my landlord will have to raise my rent to cover the millage hike. In fact, I was looking to move to a bigger, better place, and this conversation goes a long way to killing that. The city has basically done everything right in holding down costs while trying to not cut services, but it's gotten next to no support from the state. So, it's being forced to raise taxes just so's conservatives in the state Legislature can pat themselves on the back about pursuing low tax rates with such aggression. |
