North Ogden City just recently had some very emotional citizens speaking to the City council against the mayor’s proposal to extend the Monroe Boulevard as a major traffic corridor from south to north. Mayor Harris was proposing to take a “grant” for two million dollars received from State of Utah specifically for that purpose. You can imagine how much more vehement the voices would have been if the Mayor was saying he wanted to bond the city for another two million dollars for that street development.
Perhaps those speaking at the council meeting are a minority and in a few months another vocal minority will be criticizing the Mayor for not taking action to alleviate traffic congestion.
The bottom line is that the citizens have elected the Mayor and City Council to make studied decisions for the good of the people in areas where they have legitimate power.
Government leaders often go beyond proper government authority in controlling private land, but proper acquisition of land for public transportation seems to me to be solidly within their scope of legitimate power and requires some long term planning and wisdom. It is likely that wherever the a rapid traffic street is designated there will be those who appose it. But if there is real long term planning, everyone doing private land development should not complain when they build on a major traffic corridor. I did that very thing when I built my home 40 years ago on Mountain Road – I built well back from the road and left as many trees as I could in front to buffer the sound. I made my own decision and do not feel that I can complain that I live on a collector street. Those who were in charge of building Green Acres Elementary should have known that they were building next to Monroe Boulevard which was at the time designated as a major street.
Monroe Boulevard has been on the long term plan for at least 40 years. Some of the land to construct that public thoroughfare was extorted from land developers in the past. The typical method used by cities to extort the land from developers is to hold their land hostage for development until the land for the public right of way is “gifted” to the city. In this case the mayor is not using that inappropriate method of financing.
In this present case Mayor Harris is proposing that the land be purchased from the land owner, if possible, before the land owner has already developed it and thus increasing the cost of road construction. The criticism that really might be leveled is at past City officials who did not obtain the land sooner. I disagree with Mayor Harris on many things but in this case I agree with him and laud him for taking this position. It is not often that cities pay for the land they take.
The one area I would like to see different in this case is that the money was not coming from “grants”. The system of “block grants” is a relatively new corruption of government financing that started in 1974. The “grant” system is built on a hierarchy arrangement - state above city and federal above state. The money is either obtained by some form of taxation on the people or is borrowed as a bond upon the people. The federal and state can bond the people without their specific permission but the cities by laws are required to balance their budget or get permission from the people to bond them.
In the “grant” system the money obtained from bonding or taxation by a larger government agency (federal above state or state above city) where there is no requirement to balance a budget and no requirement to have approval of the people directly. The money is then distributed out as gifts to individuals or businesses or to government entities. In the case of Monroe Boulevard “block grant” it gives a false impression that it is a gift from the state when in fact it is actually money taken from the people and then returned to them reduced and with specific controls. This system shifts the blame for higher taxes and more controls away from the local officials, and it shifts the controls up the hierarchy from city to state and then to federal. In this way everyone is raging at the unbelievable trillion dollar national debt rather than at the city mayor.
At present Utah is getting 27% of its budget from federal funding. Cities are getting most of their road money from the state. The “grant system” is making us a population of beggars and producing a mentality of being demanding rather than responsible adults. Our nation is becoming just what our cities are in conglomerate. If we want to change our nation, lets start on a city level by first changing the people’s mentality.
If we were not on the false“grant system” perhaps the people would be telling the mayor that we should be developing some major collector street other than Monroe.
