This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.
More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.
The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.
Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.
Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.
City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won't pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.
This is obviously a mismangement of resources. Nothing much to do with conservatism, no. Although some of that I could definately/do definately live without.
Mismanagement by conservative ideologues, whose ability to deal with the revenue shortfall is constrained by Colorado's TABOR inititiave, also driven by conservative ideology… but isn't this what people like Grover Norquist and other radical conservatives want? To starve government of revenue and thereby force it to cut social services? You see the same thing on the national level — when the GOP controls the federal government they run up massive deficits — and then when they're out of power they point to those same deficits as a reason for cutting social spending and opposing any new Democratic programs. A clever con game, for sure…
This is the conservative dream, yes?
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_14303473
Dude, what the hell are you talking about? Do you know anything about conservatism?
This is obviously a mismangement of resources. Nothing much to do with conservatism, no. Although some of that I could definately/do definately live without.
Mismanagement by conservative ideologues, whose ability to deal with the revenue shortfall is constrained by Colorado's TABOR inititiave, also driven by conservative ideology… but isn't this what people like Grover Norquist and other radical conservatives want? To starve government of revenue and thereby force it to cut social services? You see the same thing on the national level — when the GOP controls the federal government they run up massive deficits — and then when they're out of power they point to those same deficits as a reason for cutting social spending and opposing any new Democratic programs. A clever con game, for sure…