Tom Hell, St. Joseph
The 2016 St. Joseph City Council is preparing a preliminary budget, with an estimated levy for 2016 to be almost $311,000 more than 2015. That is a year-over-year increase of 18 percent.
That is typical of the St. Joseph City Council. The fix is to throw money at it. Taxpayer money. Just raise taxes. The city should consider alternatives. Try to stay within the budget. Cut some waste. Challenge the departments to find ways to save. Get the city administrator to make some calls, see how other communities do it, file some applications, do some research. The ugly band playing in the background is the half-cent regional sales tax. It’s like morphine to that group. It appears they lose sleep, inventing ways to waste those monies, rather than being creative and using those monies to help solve the budget.