David Schroeder

“I am concerned with the increasingly diminishing returns that Milwaukee taxpayers are receiving for their ever-increasing tax dollars. I am not opposed to the idea of taxes. My concerns lie with the inequitable standards by which they are levied and how the money collected is either unevenly or unfairly distributed, or just plain misspent or squandered. With the overall decline of the economy, resulting in, among other things, increased joblessness, and the decline in property values due to the home mortgage lending crisis, tax revenues are likely to decline in the near future, making it even more imperative that the revenues that are collected are apportioned fairly and spent creatively and effectively for the good of all of the citizens of the City. Another effect of the declining economy will be an increase in crime. As a city government, we will need to be aware of this and will need to start developing preventative strategies to deal with it before it occurs, instead of trying to play catch up with knee jerk solutions as more and more of our citizens are victimized. I am concerned with the privatization of essential services in the name of fiscal responsibility. It has been my long experience with this supposed panacea that once the service is privatized, accountability to the taxpayer disappears, the service suffers, and the costs increase beyond what they would have had the service remained in the public domain. I am concerned with all the additional “fees” that are being attached and increased along side the taxes. Calling these taxpayer outlays “fees” instead of taxes does not make them any easier to pay or to swallow, and seems to me to be just a ploy by disingenuous politicians who can then make the claim that they held tax increases in check. I claim that these “fees” are actually more detrimental to the taxpayer, and ultimately to the City, than the equivalent amount of a tax increase would be. I am concerned that the “cabinet” form of government that replaced our previous form of city government where department heads that were civil service employees, has made those departments less efficient, and less accountable to the taxpayers who fund them, leading both to increased costs and decreased services.”