………….., and for them to increase constantly. Its the strangest damn thing in the world.
Why would it ever stay the same? I can’t believe anyone in there right mind would think the cost to operate a city, county or school would stay the same. Has your food stayed the same cost? Cost of a pickup? Clothes? Houses? Raw materials? The answer is no. There’s a cost of doing business and in the history of our nation, there has just about always been some level of inflation year over year. That makes the dollar worth less and not able to buy the same amount of goods and services as it did the previous year and so on. So a political subdivision that needs $1M to operate this year would need 1,030,000 the following year with a 3% average inflation to pay the same people, buy the same equipment, and provide the same services. The 12 years from 2011 thru 2023, the indexed inflation equated to 35.5%. That’s the AVERAGE, some industries seen double and triple cost increases. So a bill saying the state will replace the funds at the current rate with no inflationary increase in itself is a major issue. Political subsdivisions would be backwards on day one. You’d have to be financially illiterate not to understand this. This is basic economics.
Everyone wants to focus on the waste and talk about the big cities (Fargo, Bis, Minot) and the major counties but sadly are overlooking every small town, county that doesn’t have a major city, townships, school districts, rural fire and ambulance districts, and the like that operate on shoe string budgets and with zero reserves for something as simple as repairing a water main break or a piece of essential equipment. Until the supporters and writers of this bill pull their head out of the sand and address the major flaws of the initiated measure, they’ll continue to lose, make excuses, and degrade those that that didn’t buy into a poorly written measure that created more questions than solutions.
If you guys put as much time in trying to fix the measure so it’s supportable as you do posting about it and bitching on NDA , it would’ve passed years ago
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