Change can be a good thing. When change involves risk, a certain level of concern is justified. But when failing to change is dead-certain to bring fearful consequences, it makes no sense to hunker down and try to wait out the apocalypse.
One might forgive members of the general public for cowering fearfully in the dark. But the same response from elected officials is unacceptable, if only because they control the light switch while we pay the electric bill.
Our goal here is to push back the darkness. This week, the darkness is tax subsidies for sewers. Next week it will be something else.
Although we can't verify that it is original (and we doubt it is), we were struck by the words Rivka Galchen put into a character's head in his recent novel, Atmospheric Disturbances.
- "His response was neither random nor spontaneous; it was predetermined by his previous ideas about me; habits of thought are death to truth; I was outside of my habits; and he - he was wrong."
New Albany is being endangered. Not by "novelty lighters," as a recent council ordinance averred, but by habits of thought.
One of those habits of thought that should be recognizable is a belief by an influential faction on the city council that is so self-centric as to be bathetic. It involves the projection of one's own motives onto another. If a decision-maker looks at each choice as an opportunity for self-enrichment, then that decision-maker presumes that all others are making choices based on the same motives and motivations. That's very Darwinian, but hardly admirable.
A second habit of thought is that any proposal that is difficult to understand must have been created that way in order to confuse and thus exploit. Thus, when a decision-maker is presented with that difficult to understand idea, she becomes suspicious that she is being fooled. The habit of thought becomes a habit of action - that action being to say "no." It is foolish to think that "no" is always the safe choice, but we have a city council that certainly leans that way.
It's hard to credit the fact that a majority of this council, the second council in a row in which the voters essentially cleaned house and turned out half the members, could be steered by such habits of thought. But it is so.
Based on my reading of the tea leaves, this council is leaning toward a foolish plan to use tax dollars to subsidize sewer rates. If that is, in fact, the plan, I offer a serious alternative that ought to pass with just as little reference to the consensus view of reality.
On a council that pays regular homage to a "fixed magical belief" that they have special insights into public finance, this proposal ought to fly through three readings.
Instead of diverting $875,000 in EDIT funds to subsidize sewers (and sewer rates are based on water usage), let's divert it to pay for gasoline. Granted, many of the people who buy gas in New Albany don't pay EDIT taxes. But then many of the people who use sewers/water in New Albany don't pay EDIT taxes here. Gas prices are climbing rapidly and, let's face it, people are hurting. Under the Steve Price Plan, that's reason enough to spend tax dollars on it.
The proposal from Mr. Coffey that sewer rates be subsidized is a clear statement from him that he does not believe the sewer utility should be run like a business that supports itself. We have a number of industrial and commercial users of water that, as entities, pay no EDIT taxes, but use enormous amounts of water. The Coffey/Price plan would have you, the taxpayer, subsidizing their rates, too, but in the name of "the people."
From this vantage point, the only thing being done to the people by these two is to keep 'em in the dark.
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