PelhamToday received this letter to the editor regarding how councils spend taxpayer dollars:
Wake up Niagara taxpayers! This current Regional Council is proving to be little better than Caslin’s as far as using our tax dollars to benefit themselves and sadly, some of our local city and municipal councils seem to be following the same path.
Our politicians are becoming as ‘entitled’ as city hall staffs have been for years.
Once taxes have been collected it is no longer anything to do with the taxpayer, as on receipt, it magically becomes their money to spend on whatever they wish with an ever-growing part of our taxes being used to benefit both council and staff first, whilst, as so many headlines show, there is less and less available for the support of those most vulnerable and in need, and for the services that politicians keep promising which only continue to decline
And even those residents still able to survive economically, as they pay those taxes, can only look forward to more taxes and a decline in the services their municipalities offer.
I have seen some councils praising themselves for keeping their taxes low, at the expense of capital budgets being cut so less and less necessary and basic infrastructure is being updated. I have yet to see a single tax reduction made that makes any economic sense, they only ‘kick the (future tax hikes) can’ down the road!
And don’t forget, every single promised ‘initiative', to serve the best interests of the community and taxpayers, results from reports to council written by those same entitled bureaucrats and full of their recommendations, not those of your elected councillors.
And then, of course, another growing expenditure would be for legal services, whether appropriate or not, which is an ongoing part of ‘doing city business’. Funny that, I always believed that as it is our elected councils who retain a lawyer to serve a city/township’s ‘best interests’ that the resident’s interests would be the first to be protected by these lawyers.
Silly me!
Andrew Watts
Wainfleet
