Hastings Florida
The National crisis in Microcosm
If you have read the New American Constitution, then you know about the dissolution of the city charter in the former town of Seneca Nebraska. If not, please read that post.
The small town of Hastings Florida in St. Johns County is also considering the possibility of dissolving its city charter. Property values are down and city water and sewer taxes are up. People in Hastings are feeling pinched.
If unincorporated, the county would become responsible for those services, as with other unincorporated areas in the county.
Shifting the infrastructure burden from the city to the county would provide some short-term tax relief unless or until the county chooses to increase its service charges.
In case you have missed it, people all over our great country are losing faith in government: local, state, and federal. In the most recent national election, many people tried to turn a negative into a positive. They voted for Donald Trump to lead our political establishment precisely because he was not perceived as a “politician”.
Keep it together America! Stop looking for short term fixes! If you don’t like what government is doing, band together and take back the reins.
President Trump and Congress often talk of increasing infrastructure spending as if this is a newly discovered function of government. Two thirds of the federal budget is “nondiscretionary” automatically increasing social programs spending as in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, etc. It appears that buying votes with monthly checks is easier than fixing roads and bridges.
Increasing shares of state and local government budgets are spent on public pensions, many are already at unsustainable levels. See http://www.pensiontsunami.com for more information on this issue. I did a quick look at articles about Hastings and did not find a public pension issue there but it is a concern for its county and state.