Albuquerque Mayor Keller has announced that he’ll increase the police presence downtown and introduce more proactive policing practices which are long overdue. All for the good, right? Not so fast.
What’s the problem? The Mayor is asking business and property owners to pay even more (above and beyond their taxes) for what SHOULD be a basic government service. And the city has more than enough money to fund this program.
According to KOAT Channel 7, “The city has roughly $90,000 to fund the program, $15,000 of which came from PNM. The rest was through donations through the One Albuquerque Fund.
That money is enough to fund the program through the summer. They hope business owners get behind it and help bankroll it.”
Ironically, the City of Albuquerque’s latest budget represents a 20% increase. And, of course part of that budget was a $250,000 “no strings attached” donation to Planned Parenthood which would more than pay for this program if the City allocated funds to actual needs rather than funding favored political organizations and other wasteful programs.
It would be one thing to ask businesses to step up if the City were in a budget crisis, but the City is ALSO paying $3 million this year for “free” buses. Clearly, policing downtown (or anywhere else) is not a high priority.
Let’s not overlook the fact that multinational billion dollar corporations such as Blackstone (to be owners of Lobo Village, also recently in the news for violent crime) come in and do business via tax-exempt entities like UNM and attempt to use that status to avoid paying the very taxes that support efforts to curb local crime. It’s no wonder that private real estate owners in Albuquerque – faced with double taxation and the obligation to subsidize the shareholders of these foreign corporations – struggle to improve upon their property and Albuquerque in general.
And, in case you didn’t know -which is likely- as a city, we’ve agreed to further subsidize this ‘foreign corporation tax-exemption’ by $300,000,000. Ask your councilor for details.
Stop raising the budgets and then spending the money like taxpayers have unlimited money too pay more taxes.