"The Land Of Oz" - Where Taxes Are Really Not

The Standard-Examiner's new cub reporter filed his best journalistic effort to date since his assignment to the Ogden City beat, I think, with an excellent Std-Ex story published just this morning. If this keeps this up, I'll surely be tempted to start calling him the Std-Ex's Ace Reporter very soon.

The headline reveals, "Ogden to Vote on $99 Million Budget -- City's plan includes up to 7 percent raises for employees." Beneath the headline, Scott Schwebke fleshes out the story:

OGDEN -- The Ogden City Council is expected to vote tonight on the municipality's proposed $99 million fiscal year 2006 budget, which calls for pay raises of up to 7 percent for employees.

Specifically, the budget recommends a 2 percent cost-of-living raise for all workers and merit increases of up to 5 percent based on performance.

"We feel good about being able to give employees raises," said Ogden Mayor Matthew Godfrey. "They have worked hard these last several years."

As I editorialized in a previous article here, the city Administration feels flush with cash, and is foaming at the mouth to give itself and its minions a nice fat pay-raise. It appears that at least one City Council member has already made up his mind on this too. Imagine that!

City Councilman Brandon S. Stephenson said the proposed budget will allow the municipality to live within its means.

"It's very conservative," he said. "We are just making it work so we don't have to raise taxes."

"Not raising [property] taxes," and "very conservative" too, utters the young Councilman, presumably holding a completely straight face all through the Schwebke interview. Well, the one follow-up question that I'd like to ask Councilman Stephenson that Schwebke didn't ask is: "what about this -- are you saying that an increased "user fee" isn't the same thing as a "tax hike" from the lowly taxpayer's point of view?

The City Council also said in the report it supports increasing water rates in fiscal year 2006 by 5 percent, which is higher than the regular consumer price index adjustment of 2.9 percent.

The additional 2.1 percentage point increase is required to fund the replacement of half of the pressure regulator valves in the city at a cost of about $900,000, according to the City Council. The second half of the valve replacement project is expected to occur in fiscal year 2007 and may require additional fee increases.

More than $30 million in needed improvements have been identified for the city's water system. An analysis will be completed in fiscal year 2006 to determine how to best fund the projects, according to City Council.

So the City Council is considering a $900,000 fee increase for repair of the dilapidated water system infrastructure, (to be followed by a similar one in 2007, and even more to come,) and I ask myself: What is a 5% fee increase, if not an additional "tax" on the taxpayers? On top of this, they plan to raise their own salaries with the extra cash that suddenly seems to be lying around idly, rather than to directly apply it to deferred-maintenance problems that they already know about, and which ought to have been addressed years ago. I don't get it. What I'd like to know is how people like Councilman Stephenson think they can flim-flam "the townfolks" by playing these silly semantic games, and refusing to recognize increased "user fees" for what they really are -- increased taxpayer expenses. Maybe they think we're just plain dumb. Come to think of it, maybe we are pretty dumb, in truth, inasmuch as we're the ones who elected to office people like Councilman Stephenson in the first place.

Sometimes I think our frequent commentator, Ozboy, may have a point when he refers to this little town of ours as "The Land of Oz." It's certainly Alice in Wonderland at the very least, I think. One thing's for sure... It's some kind of fantasy land, where the taxpayers never get invited to the feast, yet always wind up picking up the tab.

I don't know about you folks, but I'm planning to sit in on tonight's Council meeting. I'm hoping a few of you will join me to watch the dog-and-pony show. It ought to be good theater -- the theater of the absurd.