After reading in The Morning Star what our elected and non-elected members in the Greater Vernon area are planning (i.e. new facilities such as a sports complex, museum, art gallery, library) and now Coldstream stating they want to build a new mechanical building, I can’t help but wonder if these members understand or even care where all the necessary monies are going to come from. Well guess what? They will have to come from increased taxes from all of the property owners.
It is my understanding that we will be voting in Coldstream on a new mechanical building and that we will not be voting as to whether we even WANT this new building or not, but whether we should borrow the money from the provincial government to build it. What does this mean? And where do our representatives think this money is going to come from? It will come from you and me, once again, in the form of raised taxes.
Are we asked to vote on whether we even want this building? No. We are only asked whether we want to borrow the money to construct it. We are paying for all these things yet we do not have any say in the matter. Is this not a democracy? It is my understanding that if we vote to borrow the money it’s only going to increase our taxes by 2.8 per cent. However, if we don’t vote to borrow the money, it would appear that Coldstream will erect the building anyway and our property taxes will increase by eight per cent. Is this not a form of blackmail?
I can’t help but question if these officials have been keeping up with current world affairs. The entire world is in a financial crisis. Look at Europe alone, with all the countries that are literally going bankrupt, if they’re not already. And then there are all the problems the United States has been having, all of which can affect a lot of our investments, RRSPs, pensions, etc. Forty-six states in the U.S. have to had to reduce services because they are in dire need of balancing their budgets. Fortunately for the taxpayers there, these states actually have restrictions on how much they are allowed to increase taxes. Many of the states have actually laid off hundred of thousands of public employees while paring employee benefits and pensions. They have also frozen many employee wages. They have simply spent too much money in the past and now it is coming back to haunt them. If we continue to spend money like our elected representatives seem to want to, we could very well find ourselves in similar circumstances.
There are so many people who are unemployed in both the U.S. and Canada, yet our wonderful representatives here in the Vernon area seem to feel that it is okay to keep building more and more things but don’t seem to comprehend that someone has to pay for all those grandiose ideas. They don’t seem to realize that the recession is not yet over and money is still tight.
Come November, I think it is high time not to re-elect any representatives who are in favour of this type of excessive spending. We are already losing people to other provinces because of the high tax rates here. The residents of Coldstream and Greater Vernon need to speak up and tell these politicians that enough is enough.
Arthur Klukas
Coldstream
