Viewpoint: City’s budget is full of useless, wasteful spending
Jack Jenks
Dear Mayor Davis,
After reviewing your August 5th letter to the City Council conveying your executive budget for FY 2025, I am concerned about this latest installment of the City's "tax and spend" policies.
The city's core responsibilities to its residents are to ensure public safety, i.e., police and fire, and provide basic utility services, i.e., water and sewer.
Your letter notes this is the last year of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds. Those funds were allocated by the federal government as a one-time response to the pandemic. They were not intended to launch perpetual spending programs to be assumed by local taxpayers.
Accordingly, all services previously provided by ARPA funds should now sunset. The city's transient problem continues to grow despite spending excessive amounts of taxpayer money.
For example, your letter highlights the following FY 2025 expenditures: Funding the Mobile Support Team, even though in 2022 the voters rejected a proposed mill levy for crisis services, nonetheless, not to be deterred, your administration slipped that permanent funding into the recent mill levy for the fire department.
It also highlights funding a "Houseless Operations Specialist" among other politically popular, but utterly pointless positions, i.e., the "Built for Zero Specialist' and an "Electrification Specialist;" continuing to fund the Johnson Street Temporary Emergency Shelter to the tune of $1,819,725 (the Johnson Street operation has been "temporary" for many years with no end in sight); spending over $700,000 related to the new Camping Ordinance.
Those proposed expenditures bring to mind a quote from President Reagan: "If you want more of something, subsidize it. . ."
The city is exacerbating the transient issues when it spends taxpayer dollars dealing with the consequences of a problem our elected officials created by their failure to enforce the existing laws. They have succeeded in making Missoula the "Mecca" for transients throughout the Pacific Northwest. Missoulians will take care of their own, but don't burden local taxpayers with the city's failed social experiment.
On another note, the estimated $6 million for the Southgate Crossing land acquisition is not within the city's core responsibilities to its citizens. The city should not be in the land development business. Let the free market determine the value of the land and the best possible use of the land. This is another example of the wasteful and unnecessary expenditures that permeates the FY 2025 budget.
On August 12, you proposed yet another increase in our properly taxes with your request for an emergency levy to address the homeless, i.e. transient problem. The transient issues are by no means an "emergency" but rather the result of the city's failed social experiment. Solving this problem simply requires elected officials (executive, legislative and judicial) with the political will to hold lawbreakers accountable for their actions.
The proposed FY 2025 budget will result in an increase in property taxes (5.96% for the general fund and 11.08% for the fire levy). Those figures do not include the additional burden of the proposed emergency levy. Last year the city increased properly taxes by 9.71%. Thus, in two years, our property taxes will increase by over 26%. That has a devastating effect on prospective and current first-time homeowners and renters. They are the very people you profess to support.
The city's budget discussions seem to start with the assumption that there will be a tax increase. However, the goal of the discussion should be to avoid an increase or perhaps even decrease the burden on local taxpayers.