Bait and Switch

As I mentioned Tuesday at the (Nov. 3) Council meeting, assessed fees (as opposed to voluntarily paid fees) are in reality just tax increases used to either

1. Bypass a property tax levy limit, and/or
2. Hide an actual property tax increase.

The sewer lateral fee takes it a step further using the “bait and switch” technique to sell the public on the idea.

The bait (the homeowner) is used as described in the handout I gave to the aldermen. (See the 2d page, 3d paragraph for the pertinent reference.) That is what was sold to the public. This fee would be a sort of a collective "insurance policy" for homeowners. That is why only homeowners were assessed during the first year of its existence. Each homeowner would chip in $50.00 to a fund that would be used to cover the homeowners that got hit with the sewer lateral problem.

Rick Jones still used the homeowners as “bait” at his portion of the budget hearing last week. He touted how happy the homeowners were that were protected from the $12,000 hit by this fund. Then, although only a small portion actually goes to the bait, he proposed raising the fee from $50 to $52.

I thought it was a good idea when Aron Wisneski told me about it two years ago. When I talked to Rick Jones about it that evening, he gave me the added information that an engineer that had been costing the city something like $45K a year would be given a $35K (approximate) salary increase to monitor the lateral and that the entire salary would be put into the “insurance fund.” That was all he told me.

I objected to that right away to that salary shift, as money that had been spent from the general fund was now being put into the “insurance fund.”

Somehow we came up with a figure that the entire fund would come to about $1M as I recall.

I remember walking down the stairs with him after the meeting asking more about it stating that if there were not a lot of requests from homeowners for sewer lateral repairs, then the tax could drop to the level that we only needed to replenish the fund back to the million, right?

He said that would probably not happen. The entire fund would probably be spent.

I questioned whether there would always be that many homeowner sewer laterals go every year.

He repeated without further explanation that the fund would probably be all spent.

It made no sense to me. Why would that be? The truth was soon to follow.

Later I found out the that the wye fitting repairs that I had often seen come through the finance committee and the Council minutes were also thrown into this fund.

Then there were more sewer repairs put into the fund, and now sewer inspections.

The trick here is that the basis of the establishment of this fund was to rescue homeowners that were getting sacked for $12,000 in repairs when a sewer lateral failed. That is the bait: the homeowner. That was the way the bill was introduced—an insurance program for the homeowner. Witout the bait, the aldermen would have been hard pressed to add a fee to perform services that had always come out of the general fund.

And that was the switch. The fund was really a way to funnel more money into DPW for sewer repairs.

If the aldermen were entirely honest with the people of this community they would increase taxes, if necessary, to cover the costs of the repairs that had and should come out of the general fund.

What I want to know, and I am really surprised that no alderman has requested it, and that is a complete accounting of every penny that comes out of that fund.

—How much of it actually goes to the “bait,” the homeowners.
—How much goes to that bureaucracy.
—How much goes to which kind of sewer repair.

I think taxpayers should accept the part that goes to homeowners as a one-of-a-kind fee, an “insurance fee.” I, personally, like that idea.

But the rest of the expenditures is nothing more than the plain old ordinary fee that gets used to

1. Circumvent a levy limit, and/or
2. Hide a tax increase.