sc4mayor wrote: ↑Sep 30, 2021
^ Could not agree more. Only thing I slightly disagree with is the debt thing. Every municipal government carries debt, that’s how governments fund capital improvements. What is a shame is that your average American doesn’t understand how municipal debt works.
If the city wasn’t making their payments, it would be a problem. But they are and always have. The idea that ANY type of merger would be a bailout for the City is false.
(Again, just want to be clear…I’m not taking issue with your arguments here, just the general regional arguments against the city and county working together).
I totally hear you on the debt thing, too. Public debt is good and necessary in so many cases. I guess my pragmatic outlook on it is that there is what appears to be a pretty widely held view that the city's finances "are a mess" and that a merger would be "a massive bailout for the city." It's easy for a person sitting in Wildwood where there is almost no poverty, almost no city services which is fine because wealthy people don't need most of those services, all their roads are new, no crime so no expensive police force necessary, etc etc, with almost no city taxes as a result, to criticize the city's "irresponsible spending," but, like it or not, perception is what people vote upon, and there will be a lot of wealthy suburbanites who will eat up the inevitable flurry of anti-city ads, appealing to their fears against crime, high taxes, subsidizing the city, regardless of whether or not it's true. Trying to get even 1/3 of the people in this camp to believe that what they heard from neighbors and saw in tv ads is not true, "just trust us, you won't be bailing out the city if we merge," will be next to impossible. If safeguards against this by putting city debt (whichever city it is) into special property tax zones set up to pay the debt and the debt payments, this might convince a few people to vote yes, and what harm does it cause? The people in those districts benefited from the spending and/or low tax rates that created the debt they have, so it makes sense for them to pay it, just like a mortgage. While I agree that as long as the city is paying the debt payments, debt is not an issue, the fact is that if the debt payments for the city of STL or in some random city in STL county come out to, say, $500/household a year, but in Florissant they have zero debt payments, if we don't compartmentalize that debt and the payments on that debt, in effect the other residents are paying for debt accumulated in other areas. I just don't see the terrible harm in keeping the responsibility for making debt payments on whatever city benefited from it. I just see debt compartmentalization as a rather fair way to completely take the wind out of the sails of those who have a problem with it. Another issue might be municipal service levels. Do we want to set up a base tax rate for a basic service level, then have A, B, C, D surcharges for those cities that have higher services? Regardless of whether or not we have surcharges, there WILL have to be some sort of reconciliation for the widely varying service levels from one city to another. A city with street lights every 200 feet, city-paid trash twice a week, city water, etc versus a city with no street lights, private trash collection and water service. Do we put street lights every 200 feet everywhere? Just wondering out loud, not trying to be argumentative.
