Water charging system defies logic

Belfast Telegraph

22 September 2006 The decision to link water rates to the value of a home defies all logic. It seems that a system based on the actual usage of water would be fairer. I lived in Canada for 30 years and we paid our water bills based on usage plus sewer rates. I fail to see how this new system is fair if a home, valued at £100,000 with six people living in it and using more water, would pay less than a home valued at £200,000 with two elderly people. Is it not possible to install meters in every home? Taken on top of the new rates valuation system this may well force many elderly householders on fixed income to sell their homes. It's not their fault that real estate values have gone through the roof. I'll wager that if property values drop drastically you will not see a drop in your rates. For that we will have to fight them for it. S J Ross Belfast

How Government Destroys Moral Character

by Robert Higgs: "

...I thought about this matter for the umpteenth time when I read an October 15, 2006, Washington Post story by Gilbert M. Gaul, Dan Morgan, and Sarah Cohen, 'Aid Is a Bumper Crop for Farmers.' The story concerns the widespread practice of farmers' receiving, first, subsidies to purchase crop insurance, then payments from that insurance when their crops fall short, and then, on top of that payoff, additional government payments denominated 'disaster aid.' Many farmers routinely collect large amounts of money from the public treasury by means of this double-dipping – altogether they've extracted almost $24 billion from taxpayers to fund crop-insurance and disaster-aid programs since 2000. The reporters interviewed several farmers and others not only about the workings of these programs but also about their propriety. Although none of the recipients quoted in the article exactly gloated about his serial commission of the offense, none chose simply to condemn it, either. The prevailing attitude seems to be the one expressed by farmer Charles Fisher, of Tulare County, California: "Whether it's right or wrong, if they are offering it, you're foolish to turn it down." In that single sentence, Fisher has encapsulated the rotten core of the welfare state, and he has concisely expressed how such a state destroys the people's moral character. The loot is there for the taking; you're a fool not to take it, notwithstanding that your taking it may be wrong. Financial gain trumps moral probity. Don't be a chump; take the money. I don't know Charles Fisher, but if he is like a great many others who profit by despoiling their fellow man, with government acting as the facilitator of the crime, then I suspect that he is probably not the kind of man who would pocket his neighbor's wallet if he saw it fall to the ground unnoticed, and he is almost certainly not the kind of man who would wait beside the road to carry out an armed robbery of the first passer-by. Yet he will steal from countless strangers – in effect, a little bit from everyone who pays federal taxes – "whether it's right or wrong," simply to bulk up his income from farming. (Needless to say, the so-called disaster payments rarely go to anyone who has suffered a genuine disaster; like most of what the government does, this program is for the most part a sham from the get-go.) It would be tempting to attribute this agri-plunder to some idiosyncratic moral defect caused by the farmers' spending too much time in the sun. We might recall, for example, H. L. Mencken's trenchant description of the American farmer: "No more grasping, selfish and dishonest mammal, indeed, is known to students of the Anthropoidea." Unfortunately, however, the farmers are morally the same as countless others; they are simply more politically successful than most of the others. Sad to say, for every specific form of farmer swag, the government must open the door to a thousand other sorts of booty completely unrelated to agriculture. The moral rot is comprehensive, not confined to a few bad apples, and it defiles businessmen, doctors, lawyers, clergymen, students, retirees, and countless others along with the farmers. Virtually everybody has checked his morality along with his pistol at the entrance to the legislature. "The state," Frédéric Bastiat told us long ago, "is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else." If only the great man could see us now. Even he might be amazed, and appalled, by the heights to which this futile quest has been raised. In fact, this hoary fantasy arguably has become the central truth about government in our time.

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Know it now.

St. Petersburg Times | tampabay.com "

DAVIE, Fla. (AP) -- Democrat Jim Davis and Republican Charlie Crist each promised to do something about ...property taxes if elected governor, but criticized each other's approach to the problems during their first debate Tuesday. Crist supports changing the constitution to allow voters to double the homestead exemption county by county, and to make it easier for property owners to move without paying higher taxes on their more valuable homes. But Davis said the plan would take four years to help homeowners and would come at the expense of renters and business owners. He said he would propose a $1 billion property tax cut next year that would help all home and business owners.

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Urban Renewal's Final Implosion

washingtonpost.com: "

CITIES IN RUBBLE By Jonathan Finer Page 4 NEW HAVEN, Conn. Veterans Memorial Coliseum, which for the past three decades has occupied -- some say blighted -- a downtown block of this oft-maligned city, is expected to be demolished next month. ...When the coliseum opened in 1972, New Haven officials had hoped that the 10,000-seat stadium would usher in a more prosperous era for a city with high rates of poverty and crime. But by 2002, after too many seasons with too few paying customers, the massive building was shuttered; local authorities projected that it would lose $50 million over 10 years, and that tearing it down would cost a fraction as much. The coliseum's destruction will be a depressing coda for Urban Renewal, the controversial nationwide movement that reshaped dozens of American cities from the late 1940s through the 1970s, claiming large swaths of rundown neighborhoods for huge government public works projects. Its foremost laboratory was New Haven, where officials spent $745 per resident on urban renewal projects from the 1940s through the late '60s, more than twice as much as the next most ambitious city (Newark, $277). The coliseum was the showpiece. Urban renewal spread quickly after a 1949 housing act authorized and partly funded the taking of private land by eminent domain. Flush with federal money, states and cities rushed to adopt the model perfected by Robert Moses, a mid-20th-century power broker responsible for most of New York City's modern infrastructure of bridges and tunnels, parkways and highways. His imitators around the country seized entire neighborhoods, bulldozed them flat, and constructed new roads and grandiose civic buildings. The goal was to provide "a decent home and suitable living environment" for all Americans by demolishing downtown slums, but the result was something different. Hundreds of thousands of residents, many of them black and poor or recent immigrants, were forced out. Much of Boston ($218 per resident, third on the list), including the historic West End neighborhood, was demolished to build apartment towers, a sprawling City Hall plaza and a giant elevated highway (the recent notoriously overdue and over-budget Big Dig was a costly effort to bury that roadway). Pittsburgh ($160, fourth place) built most of its downtown "Golden Triangle" during this time. In the District ($94, eighth among U.S. cities), acres of the southwest quadrant of the city were razed and rebuilt in this manner during the 1950s, with only a few stray markets, churches and townhouses left intact. In New Haven, as elsewhere, the results were mixed at best. In a book about the city's architecture written shortly after the coliseum was built, historian Elizabeth Mills Brown wrote breathlessly of its "gigantic scale" and the spectators' "experience of sheer spatial intoxication." But long before Bob Hope crooned at the building's debut concert, locals had already begun to carp that its design was a monstrosity, drawn from an aptly named architectural movement called Brutalism. Its three-story rooftop garage cast a bizarre silhouette on the skyline, and the spiral-shaped concrete parking ramps proved difficult to navigate. Two planned department stores never really took hold, and are now vacant. Today, the area is the deadest part of New Haven. "The day it was built," the Coliseum "already almost had the feel of a ruin to it," said Douglas Rae, author of a recent book about New Haven and urban development and a professor at Yale, whose leafy Gothic campus is half a mile up the street. "It is really an appalling thing to look at." ...At a series of public hearings in recent years, backers of the coliseum pitched redevelopment plans. But toward the end of a 2003 gathering, Mayor John DeStefano Jr. took the microphone. "Be realistic," he implored. "It never created any economic activity around it. It didn't even sustain a bar on the corner." As in many Northeastern cities that were once industrial centers, the coliseum's plight was but one symptom of the city's economic crisis. Even the gun manufacturer that made New Haven famous -- the U.S. Repeating Arms Co., producers of Winchester, "the gun that won the West" -- has finally ended a 140-year association with the city by closing a factory that was once the largest local employer. It was New Haven's last remaining major manufacturer. These days, theories of urban renewal have themselves been modernized. Urban planners now advocate community-oriented approaches to development, in which residents and business and political leaders are more involved in decision-making. But New Haven officials are still in love with the Big Idea. The latest large-scale scheme to transform the city is the $230 million Gateway Downtown Development Project, slated to include a sprawling community college campus, a theater and a hotel complex. There are also plans to spruce up nearby streets with wider sidewalks and antique lampposts, in the hope of reviving street life. "The city keeps putting all of its eggs in one big basket," Rae said. "I'd be happier if they subdivided the land the coliseum is on, sold it off and aimed lower -- shoe stores, bars, that kind of thing." Beny Mezza, who runs Coliseum News, a small cafeteria across George Street from what's left of the arena, said: "Whatever they put in here, I hope it gets this place going, or I'm out." During the noon lunch hour one recent weekday, there was one customer -- an elderly man watching raptly as the lottery numbers were announced on a wall-mounted television.

McCarty says someone should sue the state over appraisals.

Boca Raton News - The Leader in Local News Online:

Published Thursday, October 19, 2006 by By John Johnston For Commissioner Mary McCarty, problems with the current property tax system can be reduced to three main issues: • People who currently receive a homestead exemption are 'trapped in their homes' because to move would mean substantially higher taxes in a market that has seen real estate prices explode over the last five years. She advocates so-called 'portability' – transfer of the homestead exemption to another property. • Home renovations are also not being done, she said, 'because of the tax hit.' • And perhaps the single largest issue in McCarty's eyes is the latitude given to property tax appraisers in application of the eight state guidelines to follow in making property appraisals. In a skyrocketing real estate market, assessing a property on the basis of its 'highest and best use' is forcing landlords to either 'increase rents, or convert to condos,' she said. There is too much property appraiser discretion,' she said, having already gone on the record recently favoring both the current use of a property and its currently income as needing more weight in Palm Beach County Appraiser Gary Nikolits' appraisal formula. McCarty's comments came earlier this week during a general discussion among county commissioners to develop positions that County Legislative Affairs Director Todd Bonlarron could then use in Tallahassee lobbying efforts to in turn amend the state constitution. The discussion eventually supported McCarty's positions, although support for an additional $25,000 homestead exemption was added to the county's wish list. Commissioner Warren Newell also pointed out a pet peeve: the 'abuse' of agricultural land tax exemptions, but on which land 'there are only 3 cows.' Asked by commissioners for his view on the current climate in Tallahassee for property tax reform Bonlarron agreed 'there are inequities across the board' in the current property tax system.' I think the state of Florida is going to do something,' Bonlarron said. Nonetheless, McCarty wants to press the issue. 'I wish somebody would file suit,' she said. She wants someone to challenge the latitude sanctioned by the state, with some property tax appraisers giving much greater weight to 'highest and best use' standards in making appraisals, whereas other appraisers -- i.e., the appraiser in neighboring Broward County -- giving much greater weight to other standards. 'I don't know why somebody hasn't challenged this,' McCarty said. 'Instead of talking about how we structure homestead exemption, we need to talk about the real problems.' John Johnston can be reached at 561-549-0833, or at jjohnston@bocanews.com

Value of land is worth more than money

Sept. 28, 2006 12:00 AM: Not far from Pima Road, there is a place where saguaros still stand thick and stately, almost as if they belong. Where chollas still shimmer in the sunlight for mile after mile, uninterrupted by the unrelenting march of the inevitable brown house. There is nothing easy about this land. It juts and jars and dips and soars into a sky so blue that sometimes you can hardly bear to look atValue of land is worth more than money it.No, there is nothing easy about it. For a decade, Scottsdale has been trying to preserve this land. Laws have been passed and taxes have been raised, and still it sits there, just beyond our reach. Waiting to one day be auctioned off to the highest bidder. And here's a hint: It probably won't be us. Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-6873. Read her blog at robertsblog.azcentral.com.