I went to my local borough council meeting Monday afternoon and caught a glimpse of the time-honored tradition of government sausage making.
This is sausage making in the figurative sense, of course, just as frivolous governmental spending is called pork, despite it not being literally porcine.
There is not universal agreement on the colorful line’s origin, but Otto von Bismarck often is credited with observing “Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.”
Were Otto alive today, he might feel compelled to add elections to the law-making category, as something that can cause sausage-manufacturing levels of disgust under close inspection.
My purpose in attending the Monday meeting was to register complaints about the decline of behavior in my neighborhood.
We have had un-inspected, likely unregistered, vehicles roaming freely on the streets for more than a year. Police say they can’t catch them in the act, so . . .
In recent months, visitors to a young neighbor have mistaken our quiet residential street for a burnout box at the local dragstrip. I like auto racing in general, just not on the street in front of my house.
Dog owner neighbors, who are supposed to be the brains of the human-canine partnership, can’t seem to understand that if your dogs bark every single time they are let out, perhaps the owner should accompany them at 11 p.m., midnight, or later. Maybe at 7 a.m., too.
Those same neighbors felt entitled to erect a basketball hoop that protrudes over the alley, making the garbage trucks do a heavy-equipment limbo to get past weekly. Snow plowing should be similarly, unnecessarily, difficult.
Add in people parking directly across from each other on a street that should have parking on just one side, the cretins who insist on raking leaves onto the streets despite written instructions from the borough to leave them on the curb, and the soon-to-be-here winter tradition of parking in front of a neighbor’s house ahead of a snowstorm, then engaging all-wheel drive, smashing through the piled snow and slinking back in front of the offending person’s house, where the street has been plowed clean because nothing was parked there.
Being altogether traditional, I called the borough secretary in advance of the meeting to express my desire to speak, was put on the agenda, and got my allotted three minutes to vent.
Were I more contemporary, I’d have just stashed piles of bricks near the borough building, rounded up some mindless drones and slipped a few bucks into their pathetic hands to hurl those bricks indiscriminately, stormed the meeting, and claimed economic oppression, racism, elitism and the like.
I hung around to observe things after saying my piece Monday, and getting backup from one council member on the dog matter, and from the fire chief on the matter of his vehicles not being able to pass the streets with cars inexplicably parked on both sides and directly across from each other.
After the meeting, a guy with whom I’ve had a passing acquaintance for years, lamented the decline of the borough in terms of behavior by the citizenry.
But back to sausage making.
A borough, unlike the Federal Government, can’t just run a deficit, so budgets must be balanced. Toward that end, a proposed two-mill increase on property taxes was ratcheted up to three mills. What the heck, as long as we’re here and we’re in a raising mood, let’s do it.
Here’s where journalists get to have fun.
It’s a one-mill increase over the lower proposal, but it’s a full 50-percent higher than the alternative two-mill increase. And doesn’t 50-percent sound a lot more scary than one mill more?
There was an ongoing discussion as I left the adjourned meeting about labeling it a 20-percent overall tax increase, based on what was thought to be a current 15-mill levy increasing to 18 mills. Three mills is one-fifth of 15 mills, or 20 percent. Again 20 percent sounds like a lot more than three mills.
But the real sausage making came on the matter of handing over the mandated contribution to the county transit authority to make sure public transportation buses will run through the borough next year.
There is a demand by the authority for an increase of a bit more than $400, but several members, citing the federal money being rained on such authorities, as well as what were characterized as managerial pay grabs at said authority, quickly inspired mass sentiment to tell the the authority to take their buses and shove them where governmental subsidies don’t shine.
A vote was taken and the money would not be given. No buses for us.
That decision lasted for a few more agenda items before the matter was revisited by a disturbed council president. She and the borough solicitor implored the council to consider the elderly who are dependent on public transportation to buy groceries, visit doctors and the like.
They had valid points. But, on principle, so did the people in favor of denying more tribute to the transit authority.
In the end, another vote was taken and the suitably shamed naysayers relented. The money will be sent; the buses will continue to traverse the borough.
Sausage sandwiches all around.
If only rectifying the shortcomings of the presidential election were that easy.
Sam Ross Jr's site 