Cannon Fodder
Scrambling to find a way to pay the annual $1.5-million operating cost for the city’s streetcar, Councilmember Patrick “At the End of the Day, Per Se” Cannon reached back for an oldie but a goodie, suggesting a surcharge on uptown parking spaces.
The tax was previously pitched as one of the scuttled funding options for the uptown cultural arts facilities, when in 2004 it was estimated that a 25-cents per weekday surcharge would generate about $2 million a year.
So let me get this straight: One of the streetcar’s professed benefits is that it would reduce congestion and improve air quality by getting people to abandon their cars in favor of public transit, but Cannon wants to fund it by taxing parking spaces. Brilliant.
But Cannon wasn’t finished. Twisting logic into a political pretzel, he rationalized that his voting to accept a $25 million streetcar grant, and matching it with $12 million from city coffers, was the fiscally conservative thing to do.
“From a business perspective, it makes zero sense not to accept this federal investment and instead allow for there to be 100 percent of the responsibility on the backs of the taxpayers,” Cannon said. “They don’t deserve to have to cough up $37 million. And here we have a grand opportunity where the FTA has now said, ‘hey, here’s $25 million of that total amount,’ and we want to thumb our nose at a gift as such.
“It makes me wonder who is conservative and who is liberal,” Cannon said.
Wonder no longer, Patrick. The conservative would be the one who knows that there is no free money, that the federal grant isn’t a gift; it’s a taxing burden for yet another uptown trinket that the city cannot afford.
The liberal? That would be the one who instinctively champions a new tax and then spits out stale sophisms like, “We have to continue to work for what is the common good of this community.”
Yeah, Cannon said that, too.
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