Ann Arbor City Council keeps spending money it doesn't have

Your edition of Thursday, Feb. 18, is full of useful stories and information that would help a 50-year plus resident of our lovely city understand why we find ourselves in such a terrible financial mess.

Your headline (“City officials weigh possibility of Headlee Amendment override in lieu of city income tax”) tell us that our city council is trying to come up with $5 million plus to cover the money they’ve already spent or committed but don’t have. So let’s drag out the old saw of a city income tax, right?

And now an even more interesting twist, let’s override the Headlee Amendment, which was created to protect property owners from crushing property tax burdens created by politicians who can’t stop spending other people’s money. If they can get away with that, they can just up the property tax again and again and again.

But the article goes on to tell us that the city council has voted to spend $381,000 for a little over a half acre of land from the Elks Club on Sunset, a fancy walkway into Bluffs Park, which very few people even know exists. That’s about $750,000 an acre, a figure no one can possibly justify. It’s a figure that doesn’t pass the smell test.

And moving on, still in the same article, we learn that council has voted to continue paying an ‘outside consultant’ $21,800 for six months (that’s $43,600 a year) to “help administer the city’s public art program.” Is there no one in city hall on the current bloated payroll who could “help the city administer the public art program?”

They are quoted in the same edition as having difficulty coming up with $22 million to replace the two railroad bridges on East Stadium that seem to have disintegrated without anybody noticing it. London Bridge is falling down, but have no fear, council is here: the city’s public art program will have the assistance it requires. And they’re laying off firemen and policemen ... and heaven forbid we should mention potholes.

And they want to lift the protection of the Headlee Amendment from the shoulders of property owners. Enough already.

The cause of the financial mess we’re in isn’t hard to find. Just read your newspaper, calculator in hand.

Don H. Kenney Ann Arbor