Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Tonight's Council Private Non-Profit Earmarks

After months of following meeting-by-meeting the hundreds of thousands of public dollars being given to private non-profit groups by the Metro Council, I'm running our of creative things to say about it. So without too much more detail, here are the latest cash gifts to the non-profits:
These are probably worthy causes, but there is not one public service or infrastructure repair in the bunch. Everybody wave "bye-bye" to tax dollars that could have served the broader public and generated less patronage between elected officials and non-profits.

2 comments:

  1. No public service?????

    Renewal House can do its work or we pay for jail cells...the city can find places for our homeless vets to sleep or Operation Stand down can......Bethlehen Center and Big brothers can help us reach the at risk youth of the intercity or we can build even more jail cells......The Red Cross can be ready when a storm blows your house away or we can pay the Public Works Dept. to be ready.....

    There is plenty of waste of tax dollars to point out but is not one of them.

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  2. As I said, any single one of these taken alone may be a worthy cause that has public affects. However, taken with the hundreds of thousands of dollars that have been lavished on non-profits since October 2006 from this "infrastructure" pool of property taxes, public services are sorely underfunded in this giveaway.

    Tax money should be going FIRST to real public services and infrastructure and only secondarily to private non-profits. For example, rather than giving tax dollars away to Big Brothers, we should be plowing that money back into Metro youth programs, like those at our Public Parks.

    Otherwise, this is exactly a waste of property taxes and only serves to strengthen patronage between council members and those organizations that can return favors later.

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