So to whom should the voters look to be made whole on this — the consultants? We’re paying for a complete special election for precisely one measure — tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars — for what turns out to be even more of a half-baked idea than imaginable. There were lots of fundamental contradictions and issues with this proposal, so it should never have been referred to the voters in the first place — if it was a good idea, another six months or a year would not have hurt it. Instead, we are just lucky that folks like Dzieza and Jim Lazar have been tirelessly surfacing these problems before the vote.
In what I hope is the aftermath of defeat of prop 1, we do need to look and have a serious think about how we fund municipal services in this state — all of them — including fire.,
Cities all over America are increasingly having to confront that they have made commitments to fund things that they lack the wherewithal to deliver on. This is certainly true in the south sound area. If you added up the costs to maintain or replace all the infrastructure we have in place that is wearing out relentlessly, year upon year, you will see that we are insolvent.
Our pattern of car-dominated suburban density style of development is bankrupting us. Sadly, rather than addressing the root cause and changing our development practices, we get proposals like this RFA, which doesn’t address the cause of constrained funding, it just proposes to put fire in a special category of services with the ability to extract money from the taxpayers pretty much at will, no matter what other priorities voters might have in the future. We are experiencing a birth dearth and are going to see a lot of pain in the schools system in years to come as well.
The bottom line is that the bills are coming due for decades of low productivity development that has created a very high cost system, even as people are getting hammered by increased costs of living for housing and other necessities. By not building enough and dense enough housing, we’ve artificially forced up property values, which is great for property owners, but not so much for their kids or grandkids, who have no hope of being able to live in such neighborhoods.
In the end, a lot of cities are either going to have to merge with others to get some economy of scale (by increasing the scope of management and eliminating as many administrative positions as possible) or disincorporate and go back to county level services instead of city service levels. We’re at the exact worst spot — we want urban level services, but we’re occupying the land in such a low-density, semi-rural way that we cannot afford what we’ve convinced ourselves that we’re due.
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