Are Your Tax Dollars Working For You Or Your Leaders?

I have been amused over the years as well compensated part-time elected officials make political hay and congratulate themselves on a few dollars saved while alternately wasting or socking away tens of thousands of dollars annually. Paying winter property taxes in Cheboygan County makes me nostalgic for places and times where a home, business, or property increased in value every year. 

The smallest local tax bite is about 17.5 mills and Tuscarora Township, trying hard to become a failing city, has the biggest bite with 24 mills (A mill is $1 tax per $1,000 taxable value). The Village residents of Wolverine, Mackinaw, and the City of Cheboygan all pay higher taxes with the City at just over 39 mills. Your house with a taxable value of $100,000 in most townships will see an annual tax bill around $2,000 and in the City of Cheboygan with all those city services about $3,900. If you own resort property here, enjoying that cottage a few months a year, you have the pleasure of paying 12 months of property taxes and an additional 18 mills to fund our local schools. No children enrolled and no right to vote. Our educators in Michigan love taxpayers who pay for schools and cannot exercise their right to say no more taxes.      

The City of Cheboygan, Cheboygan County, the County Road Commission, Tuscarora Township, and it seems every local government that has employee pension plans has substantial amounts of unfunded pensions. Some units may have more pensioners than active employees. The big three automotive manufacturers could not compete as fewer employees had to both earn a profit and pay for all those retirees already pensioned out. Government employees never earn a profit. As pension costs and the number of retirees increase, the funding crisis will grow. All of the existing retirees and many of the government employees counting the days to their retirement will enjoy the same defined benefit plans that bankrupted some private industry pension plans. 

While national and cable news fills our heads with allocations and budgets of millions, billions, and trillions; our local townships, villages, cities, and counties are sometimes scrounging now to maintain the status quo when deficits in the thousands create a crisis. Those legacy costs, neglected infrastructure including water, sewer, and roads coupled with inadequate funding to serve developments that could bring new jobs is bad. Mix in an aging population on fixed incomes, add singles and young families working seasonal or multiple part-time jobs and we go from bad to worse. Shrinking student populations, closed schools, and fewer local opportunities for grads will drive more out-migration.

It is a downhill slide and too many Cheboygan County leaders have sat on the speeding toboggan for the last decade as much of the country climbed back from a recession. Our neighbors, Emmet and Otsego County have climbed back up the hill with their February peak unemployment rates now about half of Cheboygan’s 18 to 19%. That is proof of a growing diversity in employment. Many Cheboygan County residents already commute to Gaylord or Petoskey to gain steady year-round work while others have just moved away. 

    

Our local governments have been content to continue that downhill ride.  Our elected leaders and their bureaucracy enjoy the area’s best pay and benefits serving a diminishing number of residents. Government employees starting compensation now exceeds the area’s median income. Elected Township Boards, putting in a few hours or less a month while accomplishing nothing, receive salaries that some residents work all year to earn.  Witness the failed Inverness Township Board that has cost the entire community hundreds of jobs.  These illustrious leaders need to become industrious and actually earn their pay.