Letter to the editor from Donald Weyer:
"Oh, no, I've said too much, I haven't said enough." - Credit to R.E.M. I'm back, are you ready for some more? So, here goes.
The City of Batavia government, honorable city manager, and respected City Council are ganging up on us city taxpayers and marching forth, hi ho, with hats in hands, to get us to cough up payment for unfunded city services! Well, I'll be! I never knew I could get so many more city services, for things that I, or you, don't currently fund. Or maybe even need? Anyway, thank you, thank you!
Seems that most of them are in Public Works and the Water Department. Pay for job-related operating licenses and fees for city employees? What's next, pay for their driver's licenses, vehicle registrations, and work clothes? Come on, we already foot the bill for their heavy equipment, their hand tools, their paperwork, and their pens and pencils and erasers to fill out and correct that paperwork! Pay a stormwater fee? Who or what produces that type of water, and puts it in the streets? No problem, I always suspected all of us had a numinous aspect to our beings. Unfilled city job positions? Well, if they're unfilled, they're unfunded, so why worry about funding them? You'll just end up with more employees that you'll have to keep an eye on and pay fringe benefits to and to get yet more funds to do all this. Work with what you've got.
I'm confused! I certainly hope that we're not playing word games here or swimming in semantics. With all this recent language spoken forth from One City Centre, I feel like I'm living in a house (city) of mirrors or being spun around on a whirlygig or riding on a Merry-Go-Round or stumbling about in a Funhouse (city, again) or being conducted on a boat through Laugh-in-the-Dark and moved along by the aforementioned stormwater (of the city, yet again)!
So get this: City Manager Tabelski is proposing that these unearthed newly-discovered fees and unfunded funds be called programs and/or plans and/or programming. Is that like we pay for a program when we attend an event, which guides us through the event (theatrical play, baseball game, etc.)? Or when we buy a medical treatment or financial investment plan to pay for services covered under that plan?
Finally, I always thought programming is what one did to a computer or a radio or TV station with its music-play or situation-comedies, respectively. Got it, hmmm, I think, highly-regarded Rachael. But wait a minute, those programs and plans and programming are optional. We can take them or leave them. Will Rachael offer the newfound city fees with an optional choice? If so, guess how many of us city taxpayers will decline the optional programs and plans and programming. I'll lay my wager on all of us.
I need now to list two famous quotations for the revered Rachael, Batavia's City Manager:
- First, from Gertrude Stein - "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."
- Second, from William Shakespeare - "What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other word, would smell as sweet."
Reader, please feel free to substitute "fee" for each rose in the two quotations!
"Now I've said too much." - "Trying to keep up with you, And I don't know if I can do it" (again, credit R.E.M.), following the City Council and Manager 2024 budget reviews.
"Plain truth is nothing Nothing but the plain truth" (according to Gentle Giant), and I guess it is the best, and only, advice to offer the players/protagonists in the budget reviews!
Get a whiff of some recent worrisome and noisome rumblings and mumblings emanating from the environs of city budget review rooms:
- "Unfunded supplies, positions, studies, equipment, and capital projects. My metabolically slow brain finally gets it, I think. These are all items on a Batavia City Hall wish list. As soon as the ruling city fathers and mothers can finagle or finesse these items with harmless, neutral words, such as "program," "plan," and "programming" (the three P's in the quiver of present-day city management theory, so to say), and to forget dangerous or obnoxious words, such as "money," "taxes," and "fees" (don't dare call them that!), then voila, the city can release its arrows to "fund" them, sort of like on a "flow chart," with us, Batavia's citizens, the targets. Fund with what? You guessed it: city taxpayers' bank accounts! Easy, peasy.
- That old city bogeyman: Genesee Country Mall! Let me get this right, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. The city of Batavia has foreclosed.
