The City of North Las Vegas has the worst economic problems of any municipality in the Las Vegas area. A combination of a drop in property and other tax revenues due to the recession, overspending and powerful public employee unions has driven the city to the verge on bankruptcy. The situation is so bad the state of Nevada may take over the city's finances.
Yet, through this, some of the city's public employee unions have only grudgingly given ground. A recent study may have revealed the reason.
NPRI's Nevada Journal reports that only 7% of NLV's firefighters live in North Las Vegas.
This creates a situation in which these workers have no interest in low taxes or maintaining services other than the ones they provide. Since their only connection to city taxes or services is as a consumer of tax revenue, their only concern is to increase that consumption.
They do not pay taxes to the city so they don't have to care whether taxes are low or high. In fact, being only tax consumers and not taxpayers they only receive benefits from high taxes and do not have to suffer any of the negative effects. Thus, higher taxes only have the potential to benefit them.
They do not use the city's services so they have no interest in the city expending money to maintain any of them, other than the services they provide. So their only concern is in increasing their share of the city's revenues, even if it is at the expense of other city departments and employees.
These workers are insulated from the effects of high taxes and reductions in the city's services. It is to their benefit to work to impose higher taxes and to consume a larger share of those taxes for themselves.
Emergency services are at the top of the list of those for a city to provide. But that does not mean that the ability to pay for them is, or should be, unlimited.
Just like any other government "services" the revenue used to fund them reduces the ability of the city's residents to support other things, like the private sector economy. Which makes it even more important that government workers are also participants in the economy as something other than tax consumers.
This is a very unhealthy situation for the city and one that is going to make it even harder for NLV to recover.
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3 comments:
Are you advocating forced residency of city employees?
Since the NLV firefighters are rarely ever recalled in case of an emergency, what would be the point of forcing residency?
If you want the firefighters to live in the City, what about the other city employees like secretaries, sewer workers, etc?
No, I'm not advocating forced residency. Just because there's a problem doesn't mean there must be a new law as a solution. Far too often that creates worse problems than the one it was created to solve, which I believe would be true in this case.
I'm just pointing out a fact that someone else discovered and highlighting the consequences of that fact. There are credibility issues inherent with this situation that the NLV firefighters themselves must recognize.
And it's not just me who has this same concern. There are people who are much closer with a much greater personal interest in what's happening in NLV who also see this as a problem that reflects on the credibility of the union.
That part I agree with. I am against forced residency but then the employees of the city need to recognize th eproblems of the city. I think most firefighters do, but on the other hand, I don't think the police in NLV give one rip about the City and are there just for their checks.
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