Jim Boyd recently suggested that essential services are suffering due to inadequate taxes being levied.
With all due respect, I would argue that any shortfall in essentials is not for a lack of tax increases, which have been rather magisterial over my 20 years here, but rather a matter of priorities.
There will never be an end of good ideas and desires. As the saying goes everyone has at least one. What is limiting are the resources to fund them all particularly here in a county with as small a tax base yet as large a footprint of responsibilities.
Budgets inherently are always constrained, but what exacerbates their balance most is when government perceives itself as a dispensary to each and every requestant with a dream and their hand out. Here however, this has been elevated to a grand art form. Rather than focusing on needs, our leadership has been shoveling out borrowed money by the ton mesmerized apparently by all the melodious luteing of the various Pied Pipers performing before them.
By my tally some $20 million over the past half dozen years has glibly been dispensed on wish fulfillment, outright gifts and consultantship mongering. Burgeoning taxes and eventual loss of outpriced local culture, sadly, are inevitable.
I moved here to escape the high cost and glory of urbana, not reprise it. As taxes have risen some 600 percent on my property in town, I have seen no palpable commensurate improvements in essential services to justify gleeful exultation in having to pay similar tax costs to those I tried to outrun. All I see is continuing empleasurement of a few unicorn merchants, at the expense of us all.
Vilnis Neilands
Grand Marais
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