Such development will bolster the assessment roll and provide more opportunities for residents, Whitestown Town Supervisor Matthew Shannon says.What opportunities? Another quick stop? More office space that will simply mean moving work from other parts of the region to Whitestown? We are an area of DECLINING POPULATION, remember? This is not growth -- repeat, NOT GROWTH. It's moving the deck chairs on a sinking ship. But Mr. Shannon wants Whitestown to be like New Hartford.
“That atmosphere is going to soon migrate over to the town of Whitestown,” Shannon said. “We’re prepared, and we’re shovel-ready for the growth.”So we get another quick stop. But what do we lose? Perhaps an organic garlic farm? The region has plenty of quick stops, but not many garlic farms. In fact, anyone who can remember back 40 years when we had 85,000 more people in this County we also had a lot more active farm land.
What will happen when a plague or some other calamity hits the California vegetable bowl? Or the cost of transportation simply becomes too high? We will want farmland nearby-- but by then it will be paved over. But that's thinking long term -- something that we've learned not to expect from our local officials.
How about short term?
Per the O-D the Roberts' garlic farm is already threatened by runoff from the site of the proposed quick stop, caused by the apparently unregulated dumping of fill on the property. Echos of New Hartford! And, like in New Hartford, the negative impact falls hardest on particular individuals. These are the kinds of problems the residents of Towns expect their government to prevent from developing. . . not pay to fix damage caused by developers later. Town government should not worry about serving the interests of some entrepreneur in Arizona.
"Providing opportunities for residents" is a crock. Bolstering the assessment roll is the real deal here . . . providing opportunities for government officials. That's been the story in New Hartford, and Whitestown wants to emulate it.
Enough already!
2 comments:
Whitestown....the NEW New Hartford. Yeah ok. Boy all that land they got for free really. I remember seeing all the stuff Lancaster Construction dumped in there when they were excavating Rt. 840 near BOCES. Sweet deal! Turned a vacant apple orchard into development land.
I wonder how many of us property owners have had our property tax bills discounted (did the tax bills actually get reduced) because of the economic activity generated by a new convenience store opening in our neighborhoods? Was your neighborhood compensated for the additional traffic (often times operating 24 hours a day and 7 days a week) that these stores produce?
We all know that the municipalities have gained via the generation of sales tax revenue in conjunction with commercial property taxes that convenience stores remit. I have never seen my property tax levy adjusted downward to reflect the additional revenue collected by our municipality or School District when two new convenience stores were built in our neighborhood. My school tax actually went up by 12%. And that is after the School District managed to consume the additional revenue these stores generated. The final insult came when the School District also managed to devour the entire STAR tax rebates!
So, who really benefits from a convenience store opening? The answer is simply that all the governments and School Districts do. They grow their fiefdoms and inflate their public paychecks. They do not share the additional income by rebating the property owners who have been shouldering the bill all along. So, when we hear these public officials clamoring on how beneficial these facilities will be to the taxpayers, a caution flag should be raised to warn us. We should ask the pertinent questions in terms of who will really benefits and who will actually pays the price for these pseudo economic development ventures. It is time we demand accountability from these public officials in terms of insisting they exercise revenue sharing with the taxpayers. They need to allow the political process to determine via voter approval if the governments and School Districts actually need and/or deserve to grow.
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