Frogs for Snakes

According to the Boulder Daily Camera, City Council last night decided to hire a consultant[1] to investigate tacking on a “maintenance fee” to city utility bills in order to fund transportation maintenance. This option seems to be attractive because they can slip it in without voter approval.

Two things about this disappoint me:

• Taxes should generally be paid by people enjoying the benefit and this idea would apparently tax everyone the same, no matter their level of use, while not taxing people from outside Boulder, who we also let drive on our streets.
• The City Manager just went through a thorough, city-wide budget review, and you’d think transportation maintenance costs, which most would agree are a core-value, would have been covered before such things as parks and recreation and libraries.

1. The consultant they have in mind is probably somebody’s brother-in-law so this comment is likely irrelevant or ridiculously obvious, but why are we paying THEM?

The BBC reports that Cormac McCarthy’s 50 year old, worn out Olivetti manual typrewriter is for sale. High bids are expected to be around $20,000.

I have an almost new Olympia SM-9 I can let you have for half that, just in case you were thinking of bidding on it. His is worn out, whereas mine has many, many great novels left in it.

“Officers arrested a 25-year-old Boulder woman on charges of reckless endangerment and criminal mischief after she was accused of throwing cinder blocks off a second-story balcony in the 2300 block of South St. The blocks hit one car and narrowly missed a passerby. 09-15384.”

They didn’t mention that alcohol might have been involved. And what were the cinder blocks doing up there in the first place? Did this 25 year old woman haul them up herself or did she have accomplices? I really want the backstory.