Wichita budget hearing reveals fundamental problem with government

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At yesterday’s public hearing regarding the City of Wichita budget, the attitude of Wichita’s public employee union became clear: more tax revenue is needed.

Speaking to the council, Harold Schlechtweg, business representative of Service Employees International Union Local 513 suggested that the city consider raising taxes by raising the mill levy (property taxes). “We don’t believe taxes are too high in the City of Wichita,” he said.

This illustrates a fundamental problem of government: in order for the employees in Schlechtweg’s union to be paid anything at all — much less to receive a raise in pay — the city must levy taxes. (The city collects some revenue in fees, but most revenue is taxes.)

Furthermore, if the city is to levy taxes in order to provide services such as public parks, the city must figure out how many parks to provide, where those parks should be located, and what features those parks should have.

Even a simple matter such as the level of parks maintenance is a difficult question. Presently the city is considering replacing all or most of the workers with contract workers by outsourcing the work to a private-sector contractor.

Schlechtweg, who represents parks workers through the union, expressed concerns with “[the] accountability of contractors, quality of work that can be expected, and whether contract labor can efficiently do all the work expected of city employees.”

He and other advocates for parks workers believe that the present workers provide services that contract workers will not. The claim is that the present workers provide, as I termed it yesterday, a gold-plated level of service to the people of Wichita.

The problem the city faces, as do all governments, is that it really has no idea how many parks (and related details of those parks) the people of Wichita would like, and it has no way to answer this question.

That’s because the decisions about parks are made in the realm of politics. The politicians and bureaucrats making the decisions aren’t spending their own money, except for the very small portion of their own taxes that go to the parks.

The people who take the time to get involved and testify before boards and commissions are a small group of enthusiasts. They’re quite happy for taxpayers across the city to pay for something they themselves make great use of, but the average taxpayer uses only infrequently.

The parks workers and their union, of course, depend on a high level of parks spending for the livelihoods.

This illustrates the nature of many government programs that I mentioned in yesterday’s hearing: Many government programs have a small number of beneficiaries, but the cost is dispersed across a large number of people. To the large number, it’s just a few cents here, a few dollars there. But to the small group that benefits, it’s a job or a nice park near their home with gold-plated maintenance.

If the small group — the special interest — works hard enough, they can get what they want. Many times no one else notices what’s going on.

So how can the city learn the number of parks (and details about these parks) that people really want? How does the city figure out how many McDonald’s restaurants or movie theaters are needed in Wichita? And what movies would these theaters show? The answer is that it doesn’t. It leaves decisions about these matters to markets.

The city could do this with its parks, too. It could let people and entrepreneurs decide how many parks are needed, where they should be, and what features the parks should have. Through the market process, we’d then know that we have the types of parks that people really want.

As government extends its reach into more areas of the economy, it’s getting harder to find examples where markets are free to work. The movie theater example above: there’s not really a free market for movie theaters in Wichita. The city council has decided to subsidize a movie theater in Old Town, thereby intervening and overriding the decision the marketplace made.

Comments

11 responses to “Wichita budget hearing reveals fundamental problem with government”

  1. Kevin

    We may have found an area where we do not completly agree. I believe city parks are a legitmate expense. A city park system could be what makes a city more attractive to live in, more so than the night life. Rather than water walk, I would like to see a good downtown park. I do not know which is more efficient, contract workers or city workers. I am more interested in the obvious areas of waste in local government, such as the arena, water walk , downtown developement, the Warren Theatre and Gander Mountain etc..

  2. Anonymous

    The City spent 250,000 for the Pros plan (Parks Recreation Open Space). The plan will cost taxpayeers 600m over 20-25 years, yet our streets are failing, our law enforcement and fire protection is down, and crime is up. Remember you get the government you deserve!

  3. Cybex

    You get the “government that you deserve” because it was the government that you elected by either voting for this incompetents or not voting at all. Get involved, make a difference, run for office.

    If you don’t like who is representing you, then, do something about it. Complaining is not the only course of action. These elected officials do what they want because we don’t do enough to elect people with honesty and integrity.

  4. Pat

    “Many government programs have a small number of beneficiaries, but the cost is dispersed across a large number of people. ” – Your Libertarian philosophy is showing through as that’s basically the role of government. Our national defense system and our transportation systems including roads, airports, ports, and rails fall into “government programs”.

  5. Pat, I’m glad my libertarianism is showing through. I’d be ashamed and disappointed if it wasn’t.

    Notice that’s a small “l” there, as I am not a member of the Libertarian party.

    By the way, if you’d like to learn how the things you mentioned could be provided by means other than government, I would be happy to send to you, at my expense, an audio CD of the book “For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto” by Murray N. Rothbard.

  6. Wichitator

    Wichita city government likes to claim that, “property taxes have not been raised,” since the mill levy is the same today as it was a decade ago. However, the amount of property tax revenue the city spends has soared due to increases in appraised values on taxable property. Some of this increase is due to new buildings, and that is good. However, a very large chunk is due to soaring tax appraisals on property that was unchanged from past years. The appraiser just said the values went up.

    So property taxes in Wichita have risen. I have heard that statewide the amount of money generated by one mill of property tax has more than doubled in the past decade.

  7. Pat

    Thanks for the offer but not necessary as I have a pdf file of it already.

  8. Ann H.

    I’m wondering how the parks would be decided by the market. Wouldn’t the parks have to charge an entry fee in that case? My instinct that there would be very few people willing to pay a fee to use the parks.

    By the way, I’m a relative newcomer to Wichita (lived here 14 months) and in my experience the parks around here are for the most part top-notch. I’ve been impressed.

  9. Pat

    Well, that’s the point Ann. Free-market extremists believe there shouldn’t be any government. Hence, if there is no market or capitalistic value for parks, then why have them at all. They would apply the philosophy to virtually anything owned or run by the government. While I would agree to a certain extent that our government at all levels interferes with private enterprise, the theory that Libertarians promote is one of anarchy where no government controls exist. That’s not a workable solution either.

  10. […] a post concerning the possible privatization of City of Wichita parks maintenance, I called for, in a rather oblique way, privatization of city parks. A commenter picked up on this […]

  11. […] Harold Schlechtweg, business representative of Service Employees International Union Local 513, told school board members how the union worked to get people to attend a meeting of the South-central Kansas Legislative Delegation last Saturday. He was specific to the point of reading to board members the slogans on the protest signs. […]

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