{"id":13484,"date":"2014-05-14T08:25:12","date_gmt":"2014-05-14T13:25:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=13484"},"modified":"2014-05-14T08:25:12","modified_gmt":"2014-05-14T13:25:12","slug":"the-governance-dilemma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/14\/the-governance-dilemma\/","title":{"rendered":"The Governance Dilemma"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The same-old, same-old budgetary woes: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.news-leader.com\/story\/news\/local\/ozarks\/2014\/05\/13\/easy-choice-budget-options-fund-public-safety\/9064659\/\" target=\"_blank\">No easy choice in budget options to fund public safety<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>To get more cops on the street, should Springfield leaders freeze raises for city employees? Should they cut funding to homeless shelters and other nonprofits?<\/p>\n<p>Or should they slash a projected upgrade in insurance coverage \u2014 leaving the city open, city staffers say, to significant liability in the event of a multi-million dollar lawsuit?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Which is more important, the basic functions of government or doling out money to the politically active?<\/p>\n<p>To be fair, the city manager did lay out some budgetary options that include cancelling travel for employees and stopping spending money on lobbyists who agitate on the city&#8217;s behalf in Jefferson city in addition to raising taxes and fees.  Actual elected officials also proposed cutting things like the Mayor&#8217;s Commission for Children.  So fiscal sanity and prioritization are not completely dead in this corner of the state.<\/p>\n<p>But I&#8217;d expect the eventual solution will be another sales tax increase on the ballot to fund the core business of government while the Mayor&#8217;s Commission on Children and block grants to charities are never subject to direct voter approval.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The same-old, same-old budgetary woes: No easy choice in budget options to fund public safety: To get more cops on the street, should Springfield leaders freeze raises for city employees? Should they cut funding to homeless shelters and other nonprofits? Or should they slash a projected upgrade in insurance coverage \u2014 leaving the city open, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-springfield"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13484"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13485,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13484\/revisions\/13485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}