By the time you read this, our local election will be over. How many of the eligible voters in Caribou will have shown up to exercise their right? Anything less than 50 percent makes you wonder if the referendum question results reflect the wishes of the majority of citizens. Sadly, that seems to be the trend these days. This can only mean one of two things. People just aren’t interested enough anymore or they don’t know how to make things better, but don’t want to give up their right to complain.
The city budget is very similar. Based on all the people who complain that the taxes are too high and the City Council is not making the changes that are required, you would expect to see 40 or 50 candidates on the ballot. Based on recent history in Caribou, we are lucky to have enough candidates to even have an election.
Part of the budget process allows citizens to come before Council and give input on the budget during the presentation by the department managers and at a public session before the expense section of the budget is finalized. Again, based on the comments you hear, you would think we would have to rent the Performing Arts Center to accommodate everyone, and schedule these meetings over additional nights to hear all the input from the citizens.
Council recently spent many hours discussing ways to eliminate or reduce the $50,000 cost of the municipal parking lots. This resulted in a great deal of opposition from the downtown business owners and the comments were made that this wasn’t a huge savings and if Council wanted to save money, there were many opportunities to save more money than this in other city departments. I’m sure after making these comments at least some of these business people will be at the public input session to share their ideas. I was amazed that I didn’t see any of their names on the ballot for Council this year.
It seems that everyone who runs for Council makes the following statements or something very similar to them: “I think our taxes are too high” or “I think we should be able to reduce taxes.” This is not unique to Caribou. People running for councils across the whole country make similar statements. How many councilors have been able to achieve this goal? How many cities do you know where the taxes have been reduced over the long term? I’m sure there are a few exceptions, but I would bet it didn’t have anything to do with decisions made at council level. Once elected, most councilors find based on the things that they can actually control it’s not a case of reducing taxes, but trying to minimize increases.
Can Caribou reduce the tax rate? Certainly. All we have to do is convince one of the automakers or some other large corporation to build a $200 million plant here. That would reduce everyone’s taxes substantially. For those of you who aren’t optimistic enough to think that’s going to happen, have faith. There are other alternatives. The initial budget proposal presented this year showed an increase of 2.8 mils; far more than the 1.5-mil increase I projected in my column last July that we would be facing. Can we avoid this increase for 2014? The short answer is ‘Yes,’ the long answer is “what do you want to give up.”
Just as an example, if we closed the Library, the Recreation Center, the pool, the summer programs for the kids, all the parks in the city, the Nylander Museum, and eliminate our contribution to the snowmobile trails program, the Chamber of Commerce and reduce our police force by 25 percent, we’d be right where we needed to be. My God, that was simple! I’ve managed to eliminate this year’s tax increase in less than two minutes sitting at my kitchen table. Who said serving on Council was tough?
What’s that you say? You don’t want to eliminate all of these things? Please advise what you would like to take off this list and what you would like to replace it with because none of us want to see a tax increase. Perhaps we could arrange to only plow the snow when it gets 8 inches deep, or only plow it during the regular work week so we wouldn’t have to pay the Public Works employee’s overtime. Maybe we can reduce the number of ambulances and run it like the emergency department at the hospital. You have to wait until it’s your turn to be picked up. I’m sure there are all kinds of other great ideas out there that Council will love to hear.
I hope the regular readers of this column will forgive the sarcasm included in it, but we all have to vent once in a while and when you only have one more year left in your term, it’s a lot easier to do. Remember, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”
“What have you done today to make Caribou a better place to live?”
This column is strictly the opinion or view of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of the City of Caribou’s administration staff, its employees, or other council members. Gary Aiken may be reached at garyaiken@hotmail.com.
