[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I think the question is not who needs the services, but who can
have them or is able to pay for them. Special services districts
suggest in part a failure of city services, to the extent that they
provide for simple benefits like street cleaning, graffiti removal,
and safety patrols. There's also a part which is local institutions
or businesses that want to promote themselves and increase business
via marketing, physical improvements, planning or design and the like
and are willing to donate money to the effort.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that reducing government
inefficiency alone would solve the problem. Increased services have
to be paid for, and collecting more taxes may be unpopular and even
counterproductive. So the existence of the districts also relates to
some political realities that make it easier to increase services in a
smaller area with separate financing.
That's pretty accurate. Over the past thirty years or so, we've seen a
massive reduction in the availability of tax money from federal and
state offices. So local governments have had to cut back on a lot of
city support efforts. Yes, this may have had the effect of making city
services more "efficient," but only in the same sense that someone who's
out of work has to use food stamps and strategize the coupons is more
"efficient."
One of these efforts has been the establishment of local organizational
efforts to do exactly what you've mentioned. provide for improved local
support services, like policing and trash pickup and the like, and to
plan for the future.
We've seen some complaints about these institutions being
anti-democratic, and unaccountable to public concerns. That's true, but
it's not _necessarily_ true: it's perfectly possible to create an NID
that is responsive and accountable. Might even be easier, since it's
dealing with a smaller geographic region than a city, which means that
the interests of the people involved are narrower. (In other words, if
we had a NID here, it wouldn't have to be concerned with excluding the
concerns of Lithuanians who live in the northeast.)
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