The City of Tucson is proposing a half-cent sales tax increase raising the total city sales tax to 9.6%. The increase is wanted to fund four “core” services: police, fire, roads, and parks and recreation. I would put health and sanitation above parks.

According to the Arizona Daily Star, “The city would need to unload land at fire-sale prices and do asset lease-backs – the sale of government buildings for one-time cash that are then leased back to the government – this budget year if the sales-tax increase fails.” Haven’t we heard this blackmail before?

Besides “core” services, the City funds many other programs, some of which are desirable or nice to have, but not essential. The City should look into eliminating non-essential programs, no matter how desirable.

I suggest that the following programs are not essential services and should be eliminated:

Office of Conservation and Sustainable Development http://www.tucsonaz.gov/ocsd/

Energy Office http://www.tucsonaz.gov/energy/

What programs or services would you eliminate?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 9th, 2010 at 7:02 pm and is filed under Politics. Tags for this post: Arizona, budget, sales tax, Tucson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.