Could Ishmael have been more right?

The answer is no.

Yesterday the Westerly Sun published an article about the tax breaks that the Town Council is giving to new businesses in Town.

Based on the current tax rate of $14.50 per $1,000 assessed property valuation and estimated property values, Tax Assessor Steven Hazard calculated that from fiscal years 2009 to 2013: 
● American Kuhne would pay $92,166 and would be exempt from $52,823 
● Pro Systems would pay $83,408 and would be exempt from $47,092 
● Renova Lighting would pay $108,866 and would be exempt from $72,384 In his July 30 reports on each business, Hazard recommended approving the tax sta bilization requests, saying “the impact to the tax roll is minimal when compared to the future employment and tax benefits of the facility.”
Though the council approved each request with identical “findings of fact” — that the business will be “advantageous for the town,” will provide employment to residents and will be a “long term economic benefit to the town” — councilors scrutinized physical designs of two facilities.

Yes. The impact of development on out taxes is in minimal.  If you divide the “$284,440 in taxes from these businesses during the next five years” that we are actually going to collect, we will increase our tax base by a whopping $56,000 a year!  Even if we included the $172,229 we are going to give away in the first 5 years, we would have only increased out tax base by an astounding $90,000 a year.  Wa-ho!  Aren’t we smart little Hopkintoners!  With benefits, that comes out to A SINGLE HOPKINTON EMPLOYEE.  In fact, if we had fired 2 Hopkinton employees we would have saved more money than all the development in the next 10 years will generate.

I will reiterate, anyone who jumped onto Gilman’s PAC was a SUCKER!  And the Town just provided the numbers to prove it.  Chew on that for a while, Dorothy Gale.  And if you are interested, I have a wide selection of bridges for sale cheap now that AIG is in the toilet….

But we do get to look at those awful monstrosities at Exit 1 for the next century.  And they will blot out those dreadful stars that threaten to impinge upon the eternal incandescent glow we have all become so accustomed too (and depend on to keep the booger-man away).  That’s a plus, right?

And job creation?  Is Tax Collector Steven Hazard out of his mind ?!?  Or does he think we are mentally incapacitated?  American Kuhne hired 2 NEW EMPLOYEES!  All the rest just moved from the old location!  

This is pretty much the most pathetic thing this Town has ever done.  Thank You, Vincenzo Cordone.  I would call you a fool but you never cared about the consequences of your actions (in 5 years I doubt you’ll even live in Hopkinton) and you probably did know your sound bites about development were just that, empty promises.  It’s the ones that voted for you that are the fools.  I can tell you that I saw through you 4 years ago and did not vote for paving over Hopkinton for a bag of magic beans.  Sadly, being vindicated is no real consolation.

How bad is it in Hopkinton?

Both the Westerly Sun and Providence Journal reported on the house fire in Rockville last week. I have noticed that the Journal has been getting much better in reporting our local events and beat the Sun to an article by about 5 days. Additionally, the Journal article was a lot more complete (no surprises there). The Journal included a very intriguing sentence that was completely and totally missed by the Sun. The Journal reports,

[Fire Chief Frederick] Stanley said the family had shut off the electric power and was apparently using candles for light. Candles, he said, do not appear to be the cause of the fire, which seems to have started in the stairway area leading to the second floor.

We also learn from the article that the house in question was being rented at the time but no one was home and no one was hurt.

But the point is that people in Hopkinton are hurting so badly they are using candles for light and turning off the electricity.

It also begs the question of whether we should make candles illegal for renters since we don’t trust their ability to determine if an apartment has at least two exits and a smoke detector.

Why Development In Hopkinton is Not What was Promised

Here is a pretty simply fact for you: In order for commercial/industrial development to increase your tax base and lower your taxes you need a lot of it. A really lot. And there is a simple reason for this: Running a municipality the way Hopkinton does (poorly) is expensive. Each developmental unit only pays a small amount into the tax revenues of the Town and therefore it takes lots of developmental units to make a significant difference. It easier to grasp this concept when dealing with homeowners. Consider that there are 20 houses on your street. Each house pays $4000 in taxes each year. That amounts to $80,000 a year. The Hopkinton Budget is $23,000,000. Those 20 houses pay for 0.3% of the operating budget. This means that if all these houses burned down or disappeared, it would not impact that Town budget AT ALL. Now consider how much any one business (American Kuhne, Renova Lighting or this idiotic Cedar Hollow development) pays per year in taxes. Right now they aren’t paying much of anything but were the Town to ever collect taxes, how much would they collect? $10,000? $20,000? Maybe $50,000?

In order to even account for 1% of the budget, you would have to collect $230,000 in taxes. And if you are paying $4000 a year in taxes, that 1% amounts to $40.00 less for you.

Don’t believe me? Here are some examples (minus other business taxes that will raise the total value): URE outfitters pays $13,000 a year in property taxes. Ashaway Twine pays $11,000 a year in property taxes. The company that owns the Main Street Pizza building pays $18,000 a year in property taxes (I can’t imagine the rent on that place…). Tim Hortons pays $7,000 a year in property taxes.

My point here is that we will NEVER EVER-EVER-EVER see a drop in our taxes because of development. What we will see is the god-awful mess of industrial blight, polluted aquifers and permanently disfigured landscapes. And the Town will be no better off for it.

If you really want to see what development is all about, drive by American Kuhne at 10 pm any night. You’ll be blinded by the assinine lighting spilling out onto beautiful Route 3. If you are lucky, you won’t be so blinded that you careen off the road. Do the people at American Kuhne realize that no one wants to see their building at night? Do they realize that the burglars will be going in the back door? The lighting is not going to stop any burglar with the balls to go in the front door in the first place.

In the long run, we will gain no benefit from developing Exit 1. Unless we literally turn Route 3 into the nightmarish twin of Warwick’s Route 2, all Vincenzo Crodone’s rhetoric will have been just that, hollow words from a sad little man bent on becoming the King of Hopkinton. Good job Vinnie. It took an outsider 5 years to accomplish what the residents had held the tide against for the last 50. Will the next Town Council be any smarter? In the end, all we will have done is lost more open space, scenery and the quite that this town has enjoyed for 250 years. We do our children a disservice for empty promises.

In a recent Sun article about an unrelated topic, the follow quote was made, “I didn’t come to Hopkinton to have a 1-acre lot that I could get in Cranston.” Just wait another 10 years and Hopkinton will look just like Cranston, strip malls and all.

Now that’s progress I can vote for! Dumbasses.

More on the Municipal Court…

…or rather, the lack of Municipal Courts in Rhode Island.

As of June, there are 16 communities in Rhode Island that do not have a municipal court.  They are:

Barrington
Charlestown*
Exeter*
Foster  
Glocester  
Jamestown*
Little Compton 
New Shoreham     
North Kingstown*
North Smithfield 
Portsmouth 
Richmond 
Scituate  
Smithfield*
South Kingstown 
West Greenwich

Towns which have a star have legislative authority to set up a municipal court anytime they want but have not yet taken the State of Rhode Island up on it’s offer. 41% of Rhode Island Towns do not have a municipal court. That seems like a large number to me, almost half.

You will notice that there are some LARGE municipalities included in the list.

I guess they don’t have illegal apartments in those Towns. I wonder why not? If you didn’t notice that the last sentence was dripping with sarcasm, the point I am trying to make is that there is something more to Hopkinton’s municipal court than illegal apartments. I really think that the illegal apartment issue is a red herring and if it were as problematic as the municipal court proponents say, every Town would have instituted a court years ago. But it’s not and they have not.

SK: 30,000 people. No Municipal Court. NK: 27,000 people. No Municipal Court. Smithfield: 20,000 people. No Municipal Court. Portsmouth: 17,000 people. No Municipal Court. Barrington: 17,000 people. No Municipal Court.

Get the picture?