SadistDave
Posts: 801
Joined: 3/11/2005
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And then there is the rest of the story...
This is the town hall meeting in Troy prior to the vote. If you bother wading through the entire 60 minutes of it you will find out a few interesting things about the library issue. The media campaign on burning books, as clever as it may have been, was a lie based on a lie.
- This vote was all about where the funding was going to come from. The city of Troy had about a 12-13 million dollar surplus that was growing in 2011 when this was going on.
- The vote to add the $.07 tax to fund the library as party of the general city fund had failed 2 times prior to the 2011 vote being discussed here. Since February 2010, the city's scare tactics have included threats to close down the museums, civic centers, and reduce ital city services in spite of the growing surplus the city is enjoying.
- This tax is legally tied to the Library, and cannot be used for anything else. This time, the city council presented this as an emergency due to lack of funding, and they deliberately cut the funding to the library even though the city was operating at a surplus in order to push the tax issue. In spite of the 12-13 million dollar surplus in city coffers, the council voted to bully the city of Troy Michigan by putting the issue up for vote again with the decision already agreed and voted upon in council that they would de-fund the library completely if the vote failed.
- Both sides agree that the city would not have received revenues for 6 months if the vote passed. As the city council presented the issue, the city would not have the money to fund the library and it would have closed the next month if the tax was voted down. However, the city council would have mysteriously had enough money to fund it for 6 months IF the vote passed.
- The library costs approximately 2.5 million dollars a year to run at peak efficiency. Along with the growing revenue that the city was already seeing, the No voters had also brought forward a list of programs that were less important than the library and should (in their opinion) have been cut before the Library had even seen a funding reduction. Those programs cost the city 6 million dollars annually.
- The city of Troy had recently renegotiated city worker contracts and the unions had agreed to a 10% reduction in benefits across the board. That saved the city 3.4 million dollars per year. (More than enough to cover the cost of the library.) However, the city council refused to factor that 3.4 million dollars into their budget. At the time of the debate, that 3.4 million dollars was not in the budget, and the whereabouts of the money was not disclosed by the council member on the Yes panel.
It appears that the city of Troy was bamboozled into voting for a tax that they would not have needed if their city council had been doing it's job correctly.
-SD-
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Book Burning Party at Library - 
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