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Letter: Penticton’s grand taxpayer con

Penticton’s grand taxpayer con
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Penticton Western News letters to the editor.

Penticton’s grand taxpayer con

When examined from the perspective of benefit to Penticton citizens and/or taxpayers, the exploitation of public infrastructure and services consumed by a privatized event like Challenge Penticton (or the Granfondo or ITU) provides no evident public value.

There is no financial or monetary benefit to the city purse, to taxpayers and no social benefit to most city dwellers; the brute reality is the costs far outweigh benefits to the public.

These choking private events happen to be a massive transfer of public value, resources and public dollars to private interests, who in this case (again, as in past private events) pay the public not a dime — zero — for the privilege of exploiting taxpayers property (roads), co-opting services taxpayers maintain and own (policing, traffic control, city maintenance, clean up and more) and, to add insult to injury, conning our seemingly mindless council and administration into forking over several hundred thousand dollars in outright donations. Astounding! Only this council and senior managers at city hall, along with their private benefactors, can distort this into being something of general public value.

I recognize that bikes are vehicles and need roads, and that some good things come to some people who bike (on paved roads). But that’s not the issue or the problem. The problem is consumption of publicly owned resources with no return to the public purse.

Related: Editorial: No pain, no gain

We charge people to cut publicly owned trees (not nearly enough however), catch fish, or drive a vehicle on our roads. Where is the 10 per cent royalty on profits that this council and administration should be collecting from these competition “free enterprisers?” Why not a $20 per head “maintenance” fee paid to the city — and another $20 to RDOS — to cover costs and reimburse taxpayers. We pay dearly to build and maintain our infrastructure, and these professional events people and companies want all the goodies — while shutting the doors on normal citizen activity — and then waltz off without a penny paid to taxpayers. That is a grand taxpayer con (or should I say GrandCondo).

One thing is common to people and organizations that prey on municipal governments; they can spot a sucker months and miles away, and few in B.C. are more notable for giving away taxpayers dollars and handing over taxpayers and citizens property and services than Penticton city council and our beloved senior managers. These taxpayer predators all know the system; word spreads faster than a Trump tweet, and with just about the same disastrous taxpayer consequences. You got some sort of private money making scheme and need someone else to pick up the tab, do much of the work, and suffer the disadvantages? Hey, Penticton’s looking for you.

Taxpayers spend almost a hundred million dollars a year attempting to keep this place in reasonable physical running order. They have built our superstructure over decades with a biased city council and city managers sticking residential taxpayers with an unfair and nasty tax overburden. It makes no sense at all to turn this all over to a privatized scheme, have taxpayers eat the cost of managing this commercialized deal for a week, and then? You’ve heard the quip that “they get the gold, we get the shaft.” Once again we have to choke down the fact that taxpayers — you and I — come away with no public gain that can be measured.

This city managers, and their henchmen in council, do not own Penticton; we do. They behave as though our tax dollars are “free” money, handing it out to their pet projects and the lobbyists and hustlers that prey on our broken down civil governance system. They are aiding and abetting a strain of corruption that has become cancerously embedded in this city and province. I would be proud if taxpayers raised their fists in defiance of this kind of graft – and there a handful that do — but it seems the constant bleeding of their dollars, the growing theft of their rights as citizens and their eviscerated authority as owners of public property, has not yet hurt a functional majority enough to prompt or force them to ask whose hand is constantly in their wallet. It is precisely this numbness and lethargy that allows promoters of private events, like bike racing, to keep siphoning special treatment and money out of the public system.

Maybe we can convince the new government in Victoria to help us do something about this.

Dr. Brian L. Horejsi

Penticton