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Port au Prince? Beirut? Mogadishu? |
January 31, 2010
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No, Colorado Springs.
From today's Denver Post:More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.
The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.
Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.
Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.
City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won't pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need. And here I thought it was a bad thing that the poor mailman had chains on his truck until last week because the County Commissioners think snow removal is a luxury that's a consequence of "big government."
This is what happens when anti-tax crazies get hold of your community.
Could it happen here? Absolutely. We already have crazies in charge who think that lowering taxes is more important than providing essential services.
And there are three ballot issues on the horizon that mean it could happen statewide. I'm guessing that I'll probably write more about those initiatives between now and November.
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