Dan Schroeder Responds to Sunday's Charlie Trentelman Column

Hopefully with the publication of this letter, the Standard will at long last "remove its blinders" and assign one of its own reporters to cover this important story in depth

But what the Ogden Police Department gets from each of us isn’t very much: $73 a year from me works out to 23 cents a day. Would you protect me for 23 cents a day? I’m not even sure I would.

Charles Trentelman - Standard-Examiner
Pondering pepperoni pizza and the price of providing police protection
February 23, 2013

Mr. Trentelman, in any case, is paying considerably more for police protection than he thinks. Besides the $73 share of his property tax, he’s paying roughly another $45 out of his utility bills for police service. The police also get a share of the franchise tax he pays on his other utilities, and of the sales tax he pays on his purchases.

Dan Schroeder - Standard-Examiner Letter to the Editor
Money from Ogden utility bills also helps fund police
February 25, 2013

In response to Sunday's Charlie Trentelman "Wasatch Rambler" column, wherein the Standard's venerable and intrepid "shorttimer columnist" calculates that his own "bargain" share of the cost of Ogden "police protection" amounts merely to the cost of a measly "two family pizza dinners," Ogden City political activist Dan Schroeder contributes the below-linked Standard-Examiner letter to the editor, publicly exposing, for the first time in the Standard-Examiner, the "hidden tax" which Ogden City secretly "rakes off" Ogden City utility fee revenue:

• Money from Ogden utility bills also helps fund police

So far the Standard has been "sitting on its thumbs," and has remained completely oblivious to Dan's prodigious ongoing efforts to expose Ogden City's mendacious utility rates boondoggle.  Hopefully with the publication of this letter, the Standard will at long last "remove its blinders" and assign one of its own reporters to cover this important story in depth. These are YOUR hard earned utility dollars, folks; and it's the Standard's journalistic duty, we believe, in the continuing and troubling absence of open Ogden City public disclosure, to dig in and report exactly how city bureaucrats and elected officials ever-so-quietly misappropriate or otherwise mis-shuffle these funds.

So who'll be the first to throw in their own 2¢?