[banyon]

Originally Posted by Value Pack

That logic seems incorrect. Using such reasoning would mean that Gray County, which lies between Ford and Finney County should be higher then Ford as they have a smaller population.

Gray County is disanalogous I think, as they do not have a comparable infrastructure to maintain. Still, if you have numbers, I'd look.

Originally Posted by Value Pack

Personally I believe that the problem lies with City and County Commissioners that can't see the writing on the wall and that don't know how to say NO to everyone with their hand out. It they ran their businesses like they run the CITY/County, they would quickly be out of business.

We can't continue to spend money like there is no tomorrow. Our school system, our County and our City governments are working 24/7 on ways to spend more money. Our school system may be the worse culprit of all.

Look at Boothill. This is now a black hole for money. If this was a restaurant what would you do if your walk-ins dropped from 300 a day (Boothill 300,000 @ yr) to 60 (60,000) people a day. You reduce the amount of employees and get a smaller building with less overhead if you can't expect 300 people per day anymore. You adapt or you go out of business. What we are doing instead is taking a $10.00 meal and trying to double/triple the price to make up for the lack of people. So what happens, the people eat somewhere else.

I don't necessarily disagree with the Boot Hill stance, it does seem wasteful.

Originally Posted by Value Pack

I have seen my property tax go up over 100% from what it was in 1995. Where does this stop? When are we as the citizens of Ford County going to say "Enough is enough" and elect people that know that this is a road we have got to get off.

What has happened to your property value since 1995? Just my guess, but I bet it is also up by around 100%.

Originally Posted by Value Pack

Its no wonder that new business is not coming to Ford County. They can do the numbers and realize that the overhead is too high. So what do we do, we look to the "sin" businesses to bail us out.

I don't gamble, but make no mistake I hope that this will help us bringing people to Dodge that do, but gambling is not a virtue. With gambling, Dodge City can expect to also receive at least three other additional non virtues.Crime, prostitution and more drug use. All of these will increase many times over. To say that is not going to happen is to ignore history.

Casinos often do come with those secondary community effects. Unfortunately, this sort of solution is often what's proposed when counties and school districts are repeatedly asked to slash their budgets until there's little choice. I suspect the abundance of illegals here doesn't help the problem as they likely pay little in property taxes, but probably consume a disproportionate amount of county services. Sending money back to Mexico also means less will go to sales taxes as well.

Originally Posted by Value Pack

Math does not lie, neither does history. We are in deep do-do. We have a few people who are yelling at the top of their lungs (like Old Timer) and we are doing nothing about it.

I'd like to see our budget side by side with Finney's to know what it is we're spending on that they're not. My first point though, that a lower pct of higher property values will yield a similar revenue base to a higher pct of lower property values though also seems to still be axiomatically correct.