The Fiscal Downside to Zoning for DollarsBy Curmudgeon
Front page story in this morning's Standard-Examiner talks about Riverdale contemplating a fifty percent hike in property taxes. From the story: "The spending plan also would increase business license fees by 15 percent, utility rates by 10 percent and create a 2 percent franchise tax on cable TV, gas, electricity and telecommunications."
These substantial tax increases are the result, the story says, of two things: (a) the Republican state legislature's insane crusade to cut taxes without rhyme or reason --- in this case, limiting by law the amount of money communities can raise via sales taxes. That put a major hole in Riverdale's budget which it will now have to fill by a huge boost in taxes and fees. And (b)because "the city’s public safety costs are three times higher than a typical city of its population because of the traffic and crime surrounding Riverdale Road."
And the cautionary tale for Ogden? Simply this: all growth is not necessarily good growth. Uncontrolled growth can, overall, sometimes not be beneficial for the residents of a municipality. [And if the Riverdale corridor does not represent unwise sprawl, I'm hard put to think what might.] As the story notes, because of the kind of uncontroled unwise growth in Riverdale, its crime control budget is three times [that's 300% folks] of the budgets of other cities its size.
What Ogden ought to be looking at is not simply "growth" --- at whatever price to the city, like selling off the city's biggest park for private gated vacation home development for example --- but smart growth, or what's sometimes called "sustainable growth" --- sustainable in two senses: growth that is not flash in the pan, that degenerates over time and leaves the city worse off in the end. Look, for example, at all the smaller towns that welcomed Wal-Marts as huge tax generators, only to see their locally-owned small businesses and downtowns destroyed in the process, and then watched as Wal-Mart changed its business plan to Super Wal-Mart regional centers, and began closing regular Wal-Marts in smaller towns, leaving those towns with boarded up downtown business districts, few locally owned small businesses left, and in the end no tax revenues from the closed Wal-Mart local stores either.
And "sustainable growth" in the sense that the growth accommodates to, and sustains [and improves] the quality of life within the city. That's smart growth and that's what Ogden should be looking at, and planning for. Not growth for growth's sake alone, at any price, at any cost to the city and its present residents.
The traffic and crime choked Riverdale corridor may be some people's vision of smart growth --- it's not mine. And it shouldn't be, and I hope it won't be, Ogden's.
