City Council placed a proposal to raise the Gross Receipts Tax (GRT) in Las Cruces on the November ballot. The proposal has advocates and adversaries with predictable arguments. Advocates want increased or enhanced services; adversaries either want little or no change in those services or want no additional business costs, most of which would be passed along to consumers.
My argument opposing the GRT proposal is different. City Council should not ask citizens to raise GRT rates so long as it squanders money raised at current rates, uses GRT revenues to subsidize wasteful spending, refuses to make reforms to reduce costs, and refuses to require the City Manager to exercise fiscal and managerial discipline within his administration. The proposal views companies and citizens as credit cards or cash cows.
Item 1: Las Cruces wastes money on self-insuring itself for settlements of cases of police misconduct. Insurers refuse to issue policies at all or at affordable premiums because of the frequency and magnitude of such settlements in Las Cruces. In a recent four-year period, those settlements came to over $12 million dollars. The alternative: better policing and polices with premiums likely in the hundreds of thousands.
Obviously, Las Cruces would be insurable if the frequency and magnitude of settlements were small. They are not, for two reasons. One, the Las Cruces Police Department has long lacked professional discipline and has not been held accountable. The history of police misconduct points to a history of failed LCPD leadership, policy enforcement, training, and recruitment. It is long since time for the LCPD to stop talking about its professionalism (P.R.I.D.E., really?) and start acting professionally. Whether Police Chief Jeremy Story will even try to improve the quality of policing is a question.
Two, City Council permits the LCPD to remain undisciplined and unaccountable. As I blogged (22-11-30), it accepted the City Attorney’s advice to deal with police misconduct by making settlements rather than undertaking police reform. In other words: pay a pound for cure rather than an ounce for prevention. Accordingly, it refuses to act to improve the quality of policing and thereby reduce incidents of police misconduct and ensuing settlements, and it has failed to make LCPD improvements a priority for the City Manager. Worse, it has been so irresponsible that it has vigorously opposed suggested reforms, not least a reasonable citizens’ proposal for a citizens’ police review board.
To this day, City Council prefers to tax citizens to pay for settlements which subsidize police misconduct—instead of avoiding unnecessary taxes by undertaking police reforms to improve public safety and city policing. Or it might let the responsible parties pay: it might consider requiring LCPD officers to self-insure themselves as a condition of employment. Individual self-insurance would give police officers a financial incentive to act professionally or lose their insurance and their job. In any event, the proposed GRT increase should be rejected to send a message to City Council: shape up or ship out.
Item 2: City Council is equally indifferent to ineffective, expensive public works projects. It tolerates technical and managerial incompetence—project failure, wasted resources, environmental damage—on a large scale. As a result, it squanders taxpayer money and thereby reduces funds for social programs which it supports at levels tens of thousands of dollars lower than it could. The reason: City Council cannot muster the gumption to direct its one employee, the City Manager, to demand bang-for-the-buck performance from department heads and base their evaluations on that performance.
An outstanding example is the continuing failure of a large flood-control project by the Public Works Department under David Sedillo. Years ago, PWD held public meetings to explain an over-designed, over-priced plan; ignored citizen input for a simpler design at lower cost; then adopted and executed a different, over-designed, over-priced, three-phase plan. The first try at Phase 1 washed out after the first heavy rain; the second try extending the work of the first try washed out after the first heavy rain; the third try extending the work of the second try washed out after the first heavy rain. About $750,000 worth of wash-outs later, PWD repeated its traditional management strategy in such cases: fund no remedial action, abandon the project, let site degradation continue, the city’s environmental policies be damned. Every heavy rain causes more washouts and more environmental damage. City Council responded not only by ignoring wasted resources, site damage, and failed PW leadership, but also by choosing Sedillo as a finalist for City Manager. City Council’s selection principle: you fuck up, we move you up (and let the taxpayers pay up). Again, the proposed GRT increase should be rejected to send a message to City Council: do the job or quit.
With City Council given to wasting money and the City Manager doing nothing to ensure fiscal and managerial responsibility, and efficient operations, a vote for the GRT is a vote for elected officials and their sole employee to oversee the waste of ever more money. City Council should direct the City Manager to find the revenue which it wants from the increased GRT rate ($11 million annually) in efficiencies (about 2% of the current budget $596 million) from capable management and competent execution. (Perhaps Inspector General Charles Tucker could suggest some targets for savings.)
The word “weird” is having its day, and justifiably so. The views of Senator (R, OH) and Republican Vice-Presidential nominee J. D. Vance merit its use. His “Foreword” to Kevin Roberts’s Dawn’s Early Light did not surprise me with its blunt statements of conservative goals. But one was weirder than weird: “create the material circumstances such that having a family isn’t only for the privileged.” Everyone but Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, knows that the unprivileged also have families, often large ones. Does not the old adage go, “the rich get richer, and the poor get children”? Vance’s view is simply ultra-weird in its detachment from past, present, and likely future reality. And given his professed concern about families, his ignorance about them gives the lie to his claim.
The surprise was a fundamental principle underlying many of his views. According to Vance, “Roberts is articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics: recognizing that virtue and material progress go hand in hand." (I think that Jesus would disagree, but then Jesus was not a Christian.) Vance may or may not be aware that this “Christian view of culture and economics” is not new; it goes back in America’s history at least as far as Plymouth Rock, 1620. It is the Puritan view which deems that those who are prosperous are also saved. Today’s shorthand: rule by the rich, who, by virtue of their wealth, think themselves morally and politically superior to the rest of us, thus fit to rule us. (The counter is Dorothy Parker’s quip “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” Look at Elon Musk.)
As I know from teaching early American literature (the Colonial Period is omitted from the English Common Core), the Pilgrims, the term given to those Puritans traveling far on a religious pilgrimage, were accomplished in many fields. Their motive for leaving England for America, however, was to enjoy freedom of religion for themselves, not, as is often assumed or forgotten, for others as well. So church elders punished, imprisoned, or expelled from the Massachusetts colony, dissenters and disbelievers, Anne Hutchinson being the most famous.
Puritan tendencies remain those of their theological and political descendants, today’s Christian fundamentalists and MAGAloids who constitute Trump’s base. Vance’s statement, whether he knows it or not, implies inflexible social stratification, intolerance of “others,” and tendencies to rigidity, coercion, and violence. As late as 1692, Puritans burned witches. There is no reason, three-and-a-quarter centuries later, to expect Puritanical tendencies in American politics to be any more enlightened or charitable under Trump, his associates advocating Project 2025, and his MAGAloid base.
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