Budge Slide: questions remain
Judd Grossman, candidate for town council, wrote the following on his Facebook page. We reprint here only because we at Save Historic Jackson Hole have been asking ourselves the same questions.
Regarding the Budge Slide, Town needs to do a better job of answering the following questions:
- Who’s fault is the slide?
- Do we understand what went wrong and have we taken steps to make sure that the errors aren’t being repeated?
- Why should the taxpayers foot the bill?
- If the taxpayers pay up front to fix the slide will Town be able to clawback the money once the courts decide who is liable?
- Is the Town legal team aggressively fighting for the taxpayer’s interests?
- What are the real odds of the slide creating catastrophic damage to Broadway?
Often public safety is used as an unassailable argument for government initiatives. Public safety is a core government responsibility, but needs to be tempered with return on investment based on real actuarial math, and a careful analysis of who is actually liable for the remediation. I’m reminded of the Great Recession bank bail out where the taxpayers were cajoled into bailing out the private sector in the name of impending economic disaster.
The SPET ballot process is the perfect venue for these concerns to be discussed and resolved. Which begs the question: Why are the Town and County killing SPET after August, and replacing it with their own unaccountable, blank check, money grab in the form of a General Excise Tax Increase? Are they expecting that we won’t have any more unexpected (or preplanned) big ticket capital expenses in the future?
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