WHAT'S GOVERNMENT GOOD FOR?

I read three stories in this week's edition of the Grand Rapids Business Journal that made me wonder if there is anything government is good for.

The first story was about a "Cool City" grant Gov. Granholm bestowed upon some contraption called "The Uptown Advisory Council", one of those psuedo-neighborhoods only a city planner could devise. (I think I can speak with some authority as to whether there is such a thing as "Uptown" in G.R. as I only live a few blocks away from where this community is supposed to exist.) Anyway, that's not the important thing. Rather it is the absurdity of letting the government take our tax dollars and then pick the winners and losers in the development game by deciding whom it'll parcel out our money to. This is not to say there are not some fine things going on within the so-called Uptown district. In fact, my wife has discovered a delightful bakery over there. But these good things succeed because they make good business sense, not because they appeal to some politician's sense of what is "cool".

The second story was another tale of the government picking winners and losers. This time it is the announcement of a tax subsidy from the State of Michigan for the redevelopment of the Monroe Avenue Water Filtration Plant. Yes, that's right, the very place where the Berkey & Gay developers dumped most of the poison soil that they had excavated from the old furniture factory site. Now the state is not only content to let that poison fester there, it's going to award the Filtration Plant's new owners with taxpayer dollars to build residential apartments on top of it!

The third story was a piece about the poor ol' Grand Valley Metro Council, that tax-dollar gobbling embryonic layer of regional government, not getting enough bucks from the citizens to give its bureaucrats the benefits they deserve. Therefore it is lobbying our elected representatives to finagle the property tax system to send more of our dollars its way.

Of course, the idea never occurs to anyone that maybe our government shouldn't be taking money from us in the first place to seed "cool" development, build housing atop toxic waste, and fund benefits for people who are supposed to but do not rationalize all this nonsense. And if government must do these things, why must it come out of our hide, when it can collect $20 billion in fines from environmental criminals caught red-handed on videotape?

That's right. The State of Michigan has in its possession videotape evidence of the Berkey & Gay developers releasing tens of thousands of tons of hazardous waste into the environment. State laws allow the state to collect $27,500 a day for each release of hazardous waste that goes unreported and uncorrected by the polluters. A conservative tally of the fines is now $20 billion.

So how about the polluters pay for "cool" development, new apartments, and benefits instead of us? Maybe that way the government would be good for something.