Quote:
Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks
And even those fees will be collected and not applied directly to the parks (most likely.) That is the way it works in my city: They apply fees, including late fees and a direct tax on the water bill. ALL of that goes into a general fund and then the pols get to vote where it actually gets spent.
Voting to agree to that fee--or any other--without verbage that REQUIRES the money be spent there is a farce.
New Mexico voted in a lottery--in order to give schools more money. Guess what? The politician says that the lottery funds schools--excellent! All the money that used to fund schools? Goes elsewhere. The net? Slightly less to about the same for schools each year.
NO additional money was raised. They just moved the pea in the shell game. There was no constitutional requirement--or part of the law that required them to keep funding the same or higher. It just meant that lottery money could be spent on schools and all the rest usually allocated there got to be frittered away.
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I agree with this, and it's one more reason why ANOTHER layer of funding can be a bad idea.
If you raise taxes to "support libraries" and then next year, the libraries are still struggling, people are going to ask questions. I mean, they just had their taxes raised, they can guesstimate the total extra money that went in and they can demand to know why X amount extra didn't do any good. And then it comes out that, oops, that money "for libraries" didn't GO to libraries, and then changes can be demanded.
If you institute some arbitrary fee for Y content and the library is still struggling next year, what does that mean? Well, it may mean that money got taken from the previous library funds, or it may mean that people stopped renting that Y content type. It's harder to trace, harder to track, and less likely to get people in an uproar than, say, RAISING TAXES FOR SOMETHING THAT THEN DIDN'T GET FUNDED.
Extra complexity = less transparency.