Tag Archives: privatization

Provo’s Ballooning Budget for FY 2022

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Provo’s city council recently approved a budget for the 2022 fiscal year, which will total about $304,140,333. Provo’s budget only 2 years ago was about $254,000,000, which indicates a 20% increase over 2 years, which is significantly more than inflation, even as Provo’s total population has shrunk slightly over this same time-frame. Yes, that’s right, most of Utah County’s flood of new move-ins are avoiding Provo! Thankfully, Provoans are not yet fleeing in droves, like over-governed Detroitans or Californians have done, but they might start to flee eventually if present trends continue unabated.

Since Provo is now home to approximately 116,594 (and falling) residents, this means that each Provo resident’s share of this newest municipal budget is about $2,609/year (or $217/month), which is surprisingly close to the $2,812 that socialist-dominated Los Angeles spends per year per resident. In fact, Provo budgeted more spending per resident than Los Angeles budgeted only two years ago, as we previously reported. However, Provo’s residents include a higher percentage of children than LA’s—and, considering that Provo’s average household size is still something close to 3.24, this means that each Provoan household’s share of Provo’s newest municipal budget will average about $8,452/year (or $704/month).

Along with spending profligately, Provo also ranks among Utah’s most indebted cities, owing about $99,236,398 total (partly for various boondoggles), which averages to about $851 per resident or $2,758 per household. And this is sad because it’s generally bad policy to burden future generations (or residents) with present expenses. If Provo’s budget were perfectly balanced, and if Provo’s revenue came only from taxing its own residents rather than from outside sources (such as from state and/or federal taxes of citizens who don’t even live here), then this would mean that each Provoan household would be paying an average of $704/month, as well. Thankfully, Provo isn’t sending such huge bills every year to every household—but, even so, that’s still a LOT of hard-earned money to be told what to do!

And, speaking of being told what to do, Provo’s city code has also more-than-doubled since 2001, which may constitute one reason why it budgets are ballooning also. In fact, about 2011, Provo’s mayor supervised the development of Vision 2030 to serve as a central-planning guide for Provo’s city council, whose members have openly admitted their intentions of gradually translating its abstract vision into concrete code. This statist vision originally included provisions like “sustainable” development, “smart” growth, impeded traffic, public transit, Internet censorship, business subsidies, a municipal Obamacare, improving residents’ diet-and-exercise, and more. During a “checkup” of Vision 2030 in 2016, which was then deemed more successful than expected, Provo’s city council even discussed implementing mandatory city-regulated landscaping for every single-family home!

Do you like Provo’s ever-increasing centralized command-and-control? Are these “services” truly worth the $704/month that your household is paying for them? Perhaps liberty-lovin’ Provoans should give a bit more scrutiny to how politicians are spending their money! Ideally, a municipal government (like any other political system) should focus on rights-defense, and perhaps on some basic infrastructure like roads, but it shouldn’t be running either our economy or our lives, nor managing a vast array of business operations that are better left in the hands of private entrepreneurs. As noted previously, such municipally-owned-and-operated business ventures currently include a redevelopment agency, a power company, an airport, a television channel, a library, a performing arts center, a recreation center, a fitness center, a golf course, an ice rink, a water park, a beach, a park service, a gun range, a garbage-collection service, a recycling service, and a cemetery.

Such ongoing statist trends are unworthy of Provo’s relatively freedom-loving residents, and they can only be thwarted by replacing Provo’s mayor and entire city council with liberty-lovin’ alternatives, not only in this year’s municipal elections but lastingly. So, if you want to keep Provo free and, therefore, both prosperous and progressing (unlike Detroit), then please involve yourself NOW to scrutinize this year’s city candidates and to actively promote any worthy ones that you can find!

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Provo’s Budget for FY 2021

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Provo’s city council recently adopted a budget for fiscal year 2021, which was reduced somewhat due to the COVID19 pandemic of 2020.

During this budgeting process, some citizens advocated defunding Provo’s police force in response to recent incidents of local police abusing their power to violate citizens’ rights. These calls derive from valid concerns because police, like other public officers, should act within the limits of their delegated authority (including due process) to expertly help people to defend their equal God-given rights from others’ aggression. And it’s sad when police become aggressors themselves. Such trends toward police aggression are arguably facilitated by ongoing nationwide efforts to nationalize and dumb-down and militarize our local peace officers. Such a national police force could be used as a standing army to conquer our nation from within, and is a normal part of totalitarian regimes. We should resist such trends, including abuse of our local SWAT team, but we should definitely NOT eliminate our police force. So, I applaud our city officers for rejecting such calls.

What they should actually defund—or, better yet, privatize—is most everything else in Provo’s municipal budget. As we’ve noted before, Provo’s city-owned businesses include a redevelopment agency, a power company, an airport, a television channel, a library, a performing arts center, a recreation center, a fitness center, a golf course, an ice rink, a water park, a beach, a park service, a gun range, a garbage-collection service, a recycling service, and a cemetery, none of which are involved in defending our rights. It would be better for Provo’s municipal officers to spin off all of these divisions fully into the private sector, and then sever all lingering ties with them. As competitive private enterprises, these former agencies would become far more innovative and efficient and effective, serving customers better—and simultaneously allowing public officers to focus better on defending rights, and perhaps also on a few other tasks like maintaining local roads. It’s always easier for public officers to focus on performing their core duties well whenever they aren’t needlessly overwhelming themselves with excessive responsibility over other parts of our local economy. And our economy always works best whenever politicians stop trying to subjugate it to their will and, instead, simply help defend everyone’s equal God-given rights from others’ aggression.

But such structural change won’t happen without electoral change. For at least 20 years, Provo’s public officers have remained rather enamored with big government. And this is partly because Provo’s municipal elections have remained dominated year-after-year by big-government voters. And they prevail NOT because they constitute a large percentage of Provo’s population, but because most voters don’t bother to participate. So, we who value our rightful liberty need to change this sad status quo. We won’t reverse these statist trends unless we grow our ranks in both numbers and effectiveness. And there’s no time like the present to begin—so, please make a plan and implement it.

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Our Politically-Managed Airport

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It’s wonderful that we enjoy a nice regional airport here in Utah County, and that it’s apparently prospering well enough to merit some expansion, which will increase its capacity to benefit its growing number of customers, and will produce positive “ripple effects” upon everyone who lives in our county.

But why is this growing local transportation hub being run by politicians rather than by entrepreneurs?  And why are its managers lobbying legislators to compel us (and others) to fund its expansion, rather than raising such capital from profits or savings or loans or investments or whatnot?  The state exists to exercise its coercive powers to help us to expertly defend ourselves from others’ aggression, NOT to figuratively pick our pockets to fund its growing array of business ventures, which are beyond its scope, and which distract it from its proper role.

Such business is best left to the private sector, where it normally operates efficiently and effectively and innovatively, while any exceptions are generally both rare and fleeting.  These norms-and-exceptions are reversed in the public sector, in which politically-managed businesses often exercise state power to defend their poor performance from unwanted competition.  Although our local airport may (or may not) be faring alright for the moment, it would fare far better if our city officers were to fully privatize it without any lingering political “strings” attached.  We need to set this airport free!

Sadly, Provo’s current public officers don’t appear to share such views, and haven’t done so for a long time.  Which is why Provo’s expanding municipal government now runs a redevelopment agency, a power company, an airport, a television channel, a library, a performing arts center, a recreation center, a fitness center, a golf course, an ice rink, a water park, a beach, a park service, a gun range, a garbage-collection service, a recycling service, and a cemetery, none of which are involved in defending our rights.  And it’s also why we who value our rightful liberty need to get educated, informed, and active in our local elections or else these ongoing statist trends may slowly ruin Provo just as they’ve ruined Detroit and other cities (or even entire nations).

As Utah’s weather improves, we urge you to please go kindly confront your neighbors, engage them in discussion about these issues, and organize like-minded ones for regular victory in our city elections.  And, if our website helps for that purpose, then please use it.  If you succeed, then we can regain a lean city government that effectively defends our rights, while allowing us the freedom to keep Provo such a great place to live, hopefully for many generations to come.  And wouldn’t that be worth the bother?

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Provo’s Municipal Overreach

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Provo’s city government recently produced a fun informative video overviewing what it does for us.  Hopefully, this video wasn’t very costly, and will do some good.

But, in any case, it presents a good occasion to consider not only what our municipal government is doing for us, but also what it SHOULD be doing for us.  As our nation’s relatively wise-and-virtuous founders understood so well, we each have equal God-given rights, and we can (and generally should) charter political systems to expertly serve us by helping us to defend those rights from others’ aggression so that we may remain free, which is their only proper role—and not to reign over us like kings.  Ideally, politicians should be less essential to our society than others like (for example) farmers—and if this is not true, then it suggests that there’s a major problem with our political system.

Such problems are sadly commonplace throughout history because politics (more than many professions) seems to naturally attract the virtuous less readily than the corrupt, and because corrupt public officers tend to corrupt political systems away from their proper role of defending rights toward a perverted role of usurping rights.  As political systems degenerate, their taxes rise, their debts deepen, their budgets skyrockets, their laws proliferate (not to help defend rights but to arbitrarily command us in all things), their agencies and officers multiply, and their influence becomes felt not only when one person is violating another person’s rights, but pervasively in all that we do.

We see such political degeneracy today in our federal government, which has far exceeded its Constitution to assume overwhelming responsibility for a vast unwieldy business conglomerate that either controls or (at the very least) manipulates all sectors of our nation’s economy to varying degrees, from health care to education to energy to communication to transportation to banking to finance to construction to artistry to recreation to welfare, et cetera.  Sadly, Provo appears to be suffering from similar long-term trends, as it currently oversees a redevelopment agency, a power company, an airport, a television channel, a library, a performing arts center, a recreation center, a fitness center, a golf course, an ice rink, a water park, a beach, a park service, a gun range, a garbage-collection service, a recycling service, and a cemetery.  Each of these functions should be fully privatized without any lingering “strings” attached—but, sadly, our municipal offers in recent years have persistently sought more businesses to run, rather than fewer, with some rare-but-welcome exceptions like the shoddily-built money-losing iProvo network for which Provoans are still paying.

As political systems grow cancerously, they tend to increasingly impede both prosperity and progress to the point that society eventually begins to retrogress, whether on the national level like in Venezuela or on the municipal level like in Detroit.  And we should care enough about Provo to avoid letting it degenerate likewise.  If Provo is to “remain a great place to call home,” as Mayor Kaufusi acknowledges as her duty, then we need our rights protected, but otherwise to enjoy our freedom.

So, it’s nice having a mayor who works hard without taking herself too seriously.  But she shouldn’t have so much to oversee.  And, although we have no issues with Mayor Kaufusi personally, and we believe that she seems like a fine person in many aspects of her life, we feel concerned that she (like too many of her recent predecessors) has demonstrated more commitment to central economic planning than to free markets.  As such, we invite those Provoans who still value their freedom to please educate yourselves about these issues, to please engage your neighbors about them, and to please organize yourselves to start consistently electing better public officers here in Provo in coming years—including during our next municipal elections this coming November.  If our website helps, then you’re welcome to use it.

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Preventing Privatization

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Our city’s ice-rink was built for use in the Olympic Games in 2002.  It has since served local residents in various ways, while being co-owned by both Utah County and Provo city.  Sadly, its usage fees have been subsidized by taxpayers in both jurisdictions.  Our county commission recently showed interest in divesting its share of ownership in this ice rink, which might have constituted a good opportunity to fully privatize this facility—but Provo’s city officers eagerly kept this facility fully in public hands by making a deal with Utah County to eventually assume sole ownership of it.

Provo’s city officers seem determined to maintain each-and-every publicly-owned facility that they currently oversee, and to keep expanding that array.  Their current roster of city-run businesses includes a redevelopment agency, a monopolistic power company, an airport, a local television channel, a library, a money-losing performing-arts center, a rather-profitable (for the moment) new recreation center, a fitness center, a golf course, the ice rink mentioned above, a water park, a city park service, a gun range, a garbage-collection service, a recycling service, and a cemetery, with plans to possibly add a new museum and/or beach.

As Provo’s city officers play CEO of a growing collection of business operations, this arguably distracts them from their core (and only proper) role, which is to help us to expertly defend our rights from others’ aggression.  Also, they’re not defending but (sadly) violating our rights whenever they wantonly help themselves our hard-earned money in order to subsidize other people’s expenses, such as through Provo’s new RAP (recreation, arts, and parks) tax.

Let’s please encourage our city officers to stop redistributing our paychecks, to stop playing entrepreneur, to fully privatize Provo’s present publicly-run business ventures (as it did once before with iProvo), and to focus on helping us to defend our equal God-given rights.  You may find their contact information below.

Also, let’s strive to persuade our neighbors to elect better city officers in 2019 who will do the right thing on their own without needing to be lobbied.  This is a great time-of-year to spend time outside knocking on neighbors’ doors in order to try to proselytize them to support the cause of freedom.  In doing so, you’re welcome to use our website’s resources if they help any.

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