"I" Have an Idea. I Think I Can Save Us a Lot of Tax Money.

I admit I didn't just think this up myself.  I took the idea from a number of Village residents.  Here's my current synthesis.

For a tiny and limited municipality, we have a noteworthy amount of overhead.  And our ad valorem tax rate is high to accommodate our needs, since we have no other real way of raising revenue.  And most of the non ad valorem revenue comes from us, too, in the form of user fees and utility charges.  Very many of us complain about all of this.  I think our real complaint is about the taxes, and if everything we did was free, we wouldn't be complaining about it.  That's what I think. If someone thinks I'm wrong, I hope they will correct me.

So the question is, could we have what we have, and not have to pay for it?  And I think there are some who think we could.  Here are some examples:

One current Commissioner pressed us into appointing a group of residents who will plumb the outside world, to see if we can get someone else to pay for us by granting us money.  And the resident group who will supposedly do this will do it for free.  They'll donate their time.  Another current Commissioner--actually our Mayor-- has suggested that some other imagined Village residents will also complete grant applications for us for free.  Unfortunately, one of our past Commissioners offered to do this for us, then reneged.  Our current Mayor claims expertise in this area, but she would never do it, either.  So I'm not sure this will ever happen, but the theory is that if it did, it wouldn't cost us anything.

Another of our current Commissioners sponsors a yearly gardening event on some public tract in the Village, and she calls it an MLK Day of Service.  Some of us help, and we do it for free.  Not only do we not get paid, we actually pay the Village!

Another resident a few years ago offered to donate to the Village a lawn mower.  There was a condition for the donation, though, and the condition was not met, so the neighbor did not donate the mower.

A year or two before that, a Commissioner-- the Mayor then-- offered to donate his own money to pay for a tiny public copying center at the recreation center.  I'm not sure that ever happened, but the offer was made.

Another resident, who happens to be a gun enthusiast, told me he thought we had, and paid for, too many police, and we could really contribute to our own security, literally by arming ourselves.  I suppose we would have to patrol, too, but we already have CrimeWatch, so maybe it would only be a short additional step to being organized vigilantes.

So here's what I'm thinking.  We could pretty much eliminate all of our expenses simply by doing for ourselves.  One neighbor will donate a lawn mower.  The condition was that we do our own solid waste collection, which would require us to buy at least one garbage truck.  Let's say we do that, too, and we can do it either with donations, or maybe we have to tax ourselves just a little bit.  Richard Ederr's son once spent a year as a Village employee, picking up garbage with our other hired guys.  But Richard's son got paid.  We can do this for ourselves with volunteer shifts, so we simply save the whole expense.  (Except the cost of the truck, maintenance, licensing, gas, and other possibly minor incidentals.)

We can get rid of the Manager and almost all Village employees.  Instead of volunteering to clean up one little patch of public land one morning per year, we have shifts to maintain all the public tracts all year.  By the way, we would need a Charter change for this, so that's an expense, too, but it's only one time, and it's not that much money.  We're already OK with blatantly miserable-looking medians and unrepaired streets, so what do we care if it stays that way?  We can just keep saving the money.

We already have two Village residents who volunteer at Village Hall and the recreation center, and they're both retired.  So we get more residents like that, and switch those two to full time.  Cha-ching.

Raise your hand, if you think we spend just too much money for our recreation function, and it serves people who don't even live here.  Exactly, just what I was thinking.  So we dump the whole business, and save ourselves the dough.

Our current Commission has hit on the brilliant idea of using more "reserve" ($1 per year, possibly negotiable) police officers (this is one of the great things about our new Commission: they think of the things that never before occurred to anyone).  So let's do that, supplement with ourselves on a real volunteer basis (not beating the Village out of $1 per year), go back to donated cruisers, instead of paying to lease new and reliable ones, and become truly hands on.  We have some firearm experts in the Village, and we can run our own training program.  In fact (oh, I did think of this myself), we can even train outsiders, and we can charge them for the training.  Cha-cha-ching!

And by the way, guess who gets in really good physical condition doing all the yard work, and chasing thieves.  Our new "tax" rate?  What taxes?  You're welcome.