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| On the Fast Trax |
| Wednesday, 11 July 2007 06:45 | |||||||
This past week after a lot of mish-mash discussion the city council voted on a split vote with the tie broken by a vote of the mayor to proceed with a mechanical fix of the city’s sewer-lagoon system. Readers may recall that recently Denny Rehberg, our lone Congressman, secured a $500,000 grant earmarked to help with the project. And while that will help with costs, a little, nevertheless, the bottom line is your sewer costs will climb about $20, maybe even higher. The mayor says the last thing he wants to do is put a higher rate on the people. However, in order to keep from being fined by the state and/or federal government for a system that is not in compliance with mandated federal regulations our taxes or fees or what ever you want to call it will skyrocket. What kinda-sorta gets me is no one can tell you what the fines for not being in compliance will be. I mean no one has even a “guesstament” of what a fine could be. But, down to a gnat’s patoot, we can nail the well over a million dollars it will cost to fix the problem and exactly how much to pull out of your pockets to get the job done. We can find, in a just three days, a calf in Canada with mad cow disease, figure down to a dime the cost of sending a shuttle into space to work on a space station, but even the engineers of Morrison Maierle can’t, or won’t, predict what the fines may be for the mandated –You don’t have a choice kid – rules handed down by the Feds and DEQ. What’s wrong with this picture? Fix it or else. Or else what, you going to take our birthdays away? Are you arbitrarily going to pull a number out of a hat or a jar to fine us (the city)? No matter, we got $500K from Denny. But what about the other members of our Congressional delegation, can’t they help? Recently visited in Great Falls, Senators Baucus and Tester were non-committal in saying they remember Conrad as a positive forward moving community. Well thank you so much for the compliment, but the Feds mandated the new rules, how about doing your job and help us to pay for your rules. We’re sorry, funding is little tight right now they say, which in a round about way leads me to leap on my horse to make note of just how fast the Congress can vote to fund their crummy little war in Iraq. Right now the war is costing $440,475,386,000 and rising by the second. The cost to the entire state of Montana is $674,558,000 and rising. Going a little further, it costs our Capital City, Helena, $20,087,853. For that amount of money, 58,341,190 pre-school children could attend a year of Head Start in the U.S. or 89,345 little children could go to the pre-school in Montana. What do you have to say about that Opportunity Inc? Instead, we could have insured 263,758,260 children for one year in the U.S. or 403,928 in Montana. Is this a wake up call to county health departments and family services? Instead of a War, we could have hired 7,633,513 additional public school teachers for one year in the U.S., or 11,690 in Montana or 348 in Helena. MEA and Eric, are you listening? Instead of a War in Iraq, we could have provided 21,353,373 students with four-year scholarships at public universities in the USofA, or 32,701 four-year scholarships in Montana. That staggers the imagination! MSU-Bozeman and UofM-Missoula, why are you not questioning this? Instead of the War in Iraq, we could have built 3,966,082 additional housing units in the U.S., or 6,073 in Montana or 180 in Helena. Contractors are strangely silent. Meanwhile, we get $500K, and a reminder of ‘how forward thinking we are’ and our taxes raised and Denny, Max and Jon, bless their pea-picking hearts are feeling all warm and fuzzy, so they go and vote themselves a $4,000 raise. You’ve gotta love it. So lets see, sewer rates will spiral upward. Typically that means water rates will surely follow and then trash, just like gas. School taxes are going up right along with property taxes, calculated to the exact penny. They are so right on, the cost can be compared to that of buying a pizza once a week. But still, no one, not one single person on God’s green earth can tell you what a non-compliance fine will cost. A lot. So, dues for the Moose, Lions, and Pachyderm clubs are coming, not to mention the PGC. Somebody might lose here. Hey buddy you got a quarter I can flip to see who’s out? That and I hope the IGA has a 3-for-$5 sale on Spam soon, I’m close to being out of cat food and I’d like a change of pace.
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