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| Hope and Change Update |
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| Written by Pete Theisen |
| Sunday, 05 December 2010 18:48 |
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I proposed a LOT of things for Sarasota in my last campaign that I HOPED would be financed by the apparent promised bounty from Washington. As it turned out, we did get some CHANGE, but not in the amount I had hoped for. I think I am not the only one disappointed. Of course, it could still happen. Heaven knows, we needed the jobs and transportation initiatives the spending would have provided, but the sticking point was "shovel ready". Evidently, we were all shovel ready but some were more shovel ready than others, with apologies to George Orwell. We are a "donor city" in a "donor state" - we send more taxes up than we get back in spending. One thing we can do to combat that shortfall is start a wish list and maybe a Reserve Account. Sarasota has had reserves in the past, but they are a little thin right now. In other words, could get the planning done on a number of (wish list) civic initiatives - to the point of shovel ready - for the next time the feds go on a spending spree. Also, in an old fashioned way we "could" set up a "cookie jar" of our own in case the feds don't ever favor us again. If we save long enough we will have the money for anything we really want. In the past we have been going the other way on detail planning. We haven't done any great amount of specific far in advance project planning, perhaps because we assumed that we couldn't afford what we would need in the future. Since the plans weren't finalized we didn't reserve any money for what wasn't planned, and of course, most of our stuff didn't meet the "shovel ready" cut. I suggest that we start looking a lot further forward and project our future needs realistically. When developments are proposed, we know what the impacts will be - staff might tell us - or it may even be obvious. Time after time we have let the project go on without providing for the side effects because we think the developers need a few extra millions in profit they would otherwise have to spend mitigating their "pollution". Sooner or later we should see the foolishness in this. We have to be very careful that what we *think* is creating jobs, really *is* creating jobs. A lot of promoters claim that they will create jobs. We have to know how many jobs, where the jobs will be, who will hold them and for how long. AND, what the penalty is if the promoters are lying! Suppose they had to back up their under oath testimony with a cash bond? After the promises are all but forgotten, the project is build with out of town or even out of the country labor and all we get is another half-empty building that generates a lot of traffic. We still have a two year supply of unsold properties, why would we want the unsold list to be even more? We need to get on the road to traffic management. We are 30 years behind in traffic, maybe more. We can't push this off onto our children any more,we have to face it now. Now we could cut taxes - perhaps quite a bit - for those who *truly* create local jobs without increasing traffic. |
| Last Updated on Sunday, 05 December 2010 19:00 |
Political Advertisement paid for and Approved by Pete Theisen for City Commissioner.
