Kick the bucket
May 14th, 2008 by Republican By DefaultWhenever I talk with a city employee about how they can spend money on pet projects while important issues (like potholes) go unresolved, I get the same answer: buckets. It’s every day’s excuse du jour.
I posted previously about watching crews bury electric wires from tree to tree so that the city could put up Christmas lights when signs were posted across the street telling us to vote ‘Yes’ on funding for emergency services. And when I asked a city employee about it, the answer was ‘buckets’. There was money in the Christmas bucket but none in the emergency services bucket. So everyone who didn’t need an ambulance would have a brighter holiday.
So imagine my surprise last night as I listened to the city council respond to a citizen who brought up the issue of how they were taking money out of one bucket to fill another bucket, which was empty because that bucket was used to fill another bucket that was empty because of a bad decision by city council.
I guess creative bookkeeping can only be used when it’s to cover the mistakes of the city council. But when it’s the public that needs money from an empty bucket, it’s up to the taxpayers to refill it.
I know that part of this ‘bucket’ mentality comes the fact that a city relies on state and federal funding, and all of that money has to be used the way that it was intended.
However, it’s clear that city officials can find ways around such requirements when the need arises.
My biggest complaint about this bucket mentality is that most city employees seem to forget who filled the buckets in the first place: the taxpayer. And they also forget that when the buckets are empty and need to be refilled, it’s the taxpayers who are called on to do it, usually under a false pretense like ‘emergency services’ (which should have been funded long before the Christmas lights, or the Convention Center, or light rail).
