No wonder people distrust government

Imagine you make a request to some committee at work, but it’s denied. You decide to appeal but find the appeals committee consists entirely of people on the original committee. Not fair, right? But that’s exactly what Marion County commissioners voted Monday to do with the county’s Zoning Board of Appeals.

Imagine that you bought a bunch of gizmos a few years ago that supposedly would save time and money, but they were plagued by problems. So, you go into debt to buy replacements and almost immediately find out they seem to have similar problems. That’s the City of Marion’s experience with automatically read water meters.

Imagine you put a special valve in your basement to keep water from backing up into it only to learn that, months ago, a worker damaged it and left it stuck open, leaving your basement possibly vulnerable to flooding, but didn’t tell you for months. That’s the City of Marion with its dike and diversion channel.

Imagine you bought a washing machine guaranteed for five years. After the warranty expires, do you buy a new one? Not unless you change “you” to “government” and “washing machine” to “bullet-resistant vests.” Are they really no good after a few years? Not according to a retired KBI agent and undersheriff who has test-fired bullets into vests half a dozen years or more beyond their supposed life expectancy. All you have to do to make them last longer is to wipe off sweat they generate.

It isn’t property taxes per se that people object to. It’s government spending and practices that go well beyond what people who pay taxes would do in their own lives. We at the newspaper work with old chairs and old desks. We manually label and fold papers — not because we’re luddites or prefer things that way but because we can’t cost-justify expenditures a government body wouldn’t bat an eye to make.

If you’ve lived in Marion long enough, you remember when a human walked the town, checked each meter on foot, and gave the readings to a single clerk in city hall who wrote the numbers in pen on postcards sent out as city bills. Hundreds of thousands of dollars later, the current system doesn’t function any better. It just makes for easier jobs for city employees.

That’s what people who complain about property taxes really object to — uncontrolled spending and half-baked decision-making. But don’t expect someone else to fix it if you’re not willing to challenge what’s done. Democracy demands it.

— ERIC MEYER