Sedona AZ (June 19, 2018) – The following is a letter to the SedonaEye.com editor:
In an earlier article I included the chart below to show what I called the Blob Effect. I compared the growth of Sedona city government to the alien creature in the 1958 movie, The Blob. This organism kept on growing bigger and bigger, just like our City staff and budgets as this chart attests…
FISCAL FULL-TIME* TOTAL ESTIMATED PERSONNEL
YEAR BUDGETED EXPENDITURES/EXPENSES EQUIVALENT EMPLOYEES COMPENSATION
2014 $36,145,299 119 $ 9,314,090
2015 $38,385,154 120 $ 9,605,326
2016 $52,817,475 ** 125 $10,387,843
2017 $38,360,866 125 $10,322,070
2018 $47,752,118 142 $12,648,970
I have come to realize that these ever-increasing budgets (which Home Rule allows) are a means by which the City extends its tentacles into the community.
By giving more and more funds to more and more organizations, the City makes these associations more and more dependent on its largess. Obviously the more money the establishment receives and the greater percentage that money constitutes of its revenues, the more dependent the establishment is on the City.
So when the vote on Home Rule comes around, the City reminds these beneficiaries who butters their bread.
The greater the City’s budget, the greater its largess to make these organizations dependent on the City, and hence the greater their support for Home Rule. Whether it’s conscious or unwitting, the City is buying the allegiance (and votes) of these non-profits and businesses.
In effect these dependent foundations become a part of the Blob as extensions of the City.
This is yet another way the deck gets stacked against residents as well as another reason to vote against Home Rule.
Henry Twombly
Sedona, AZ 86336
Read www.SedonaEye.com for daily news and interactive views!
Great job, Henry.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
In political jargon, a self-licking ice cream cone is a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself. The phrase appeared to have been first used in 1992, in On Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones, a paper by Pete Worden about NASA’s bureaucracy.
That’s government, hire a bunch of people and tell them if they don’t spend all the money they will have less next year. They will make sure they spend every dime possible. What most people forget, it’s the taxpayers (your) money.
Thank you Henry. Good to know.
Courageous, factual, will be ignored by voters who lack ability to understand that what they see when walking out a door isn’t reality if they bother to ask the blind man walking through the same door at the same time with them.