An Amazing Adventure...
Tax Money Finds Way Back Home
This week President Bush signed a $286.4 BILLION Highway Bill. With it comes 6,371 pet projects of influential members of Congress, who will be dining on pork for years to come. If we’re lucky, we might see some of our tax money come back to St. Charles. If it does, I’m tempted to throw a homecoming party as some of it got its start in my pocket, where it briefly resided till I filled up my car at the gas pump.
It reminds me of those stories you sometimes read of how a dog or cat is lost far from home. But somehow they manage to wander thousands of miles back home and just show up on the doorstep one day. That’s how I feel about my Federal and State gas taxes.
The President and Congress all hope we will thank them for returning our taxes. Not to seem ungrateful I thought I would get my groveling out of the way right away. Uhh, thank you. Glad that’s over with.
As a former political science student, and nearly life long observer of what works and sometimes doesn’t work in government, a recent press release from City Hall really caught my attention. It came from the Department of Public Works.
On its face, it is simply the Department patting themselves on the back for the annual applications they fill out for grants being approved. Everyone has a right to celebrate milestones in the workplace, though the release probably upstaged the Mayor or City Administrator making the announcement themselves.
What I found curious about the release was how it described the grants themselves. The description of the funds received from East-West Gateway stated:
“This is money that is gifted to the City, never to be repaid by the Cities taxpayers.”
Excuse me, but didn’t the taxpayers pay that money in gas taxes in the first place? This isn’t foreign aid we received.
Last time I checked I was paying 24 cents per gallon in taxes...all State and Federal. There is no local sales tax allowed on the sale of gasoline. At twenty gallons per week that is around $250 per vehicle. There are roughly 34,000 passenger vehicles in the City of St. Charles.
That comes to, let’s see...carry the two...around $8,500,000 we collectively paid in gas taxes. Now to check the Press Release again. Here it is, we were awarded $2,287,210 from East-West Gateway, the regional clearing house for Federal and State funding.
So if we pay out $8.5 Million, they will give us a “gift” of less than $2.3 Million. Sounds like Enron’s retirement plan.
Surely this was just an odd reference or turn of phrase. Then I read the last paragraph of the Press Release:
“With these successes, staff has acquired a total of almost $5,000,000 in grant money, without any burden on the taxpayers.”
This last number includes $2,450,000 the St. Charles County Road Board agreed to contribute towards future Boschertown Road improvements in Wards 1 and 8. I’m wondering how the County Road Board manages to do so many worthwhile projects without “any burden” on the taxpayers?
In fact, the St. Charles County Road Board gets their money from a one-half cent sales tax we all pay. You pay it in the City as well as the unincorporated portions of the County.
It’s good to celebrate successes. It’s good to want to keep people informed. But don’t forget to pat the taxpayers on the back once in a while you’re at it. The bottom line is it’s really our money...just trying to find its way back home.
