Give to the rich this holiday season

On the same day (Nov. 28) the local daily ran a story on how the Bend City Council, with money from a federal grant, might aid between 425 and 600 customers with their utility bills, the paper’s editorialists railed against it.

This isn’t surprising. In fact it is predictable from the so-called “liberal media.”

The Bulletin is against BAT, the local, modest transit system. It whined about the city spending money on bus-stop shelters. The Bulletin’s unofficial slogan is: All the News that Screws the Poor – and Kisses the Rich.

Almost all newspapers in America take similar positions as The Bulletin. It’s one of the reasons they are failing. They’re out of touch with the times and would-be subscribers.

On Nov. 30, The Bulletin pontificators wrote that the city should again offer “relief” to the developers/builders by granting them more extensions on their building permits. Afterall, developers are more valuable to the city than utility bill scofflaws and bus-riders, heaven forbid. The poor builder, who is designing that $1 million dollar spec home for a buyer two years from now, needs a break.
One of the reasons for delinquency of water and sewer bills is that the city almost annually has jacked up the those rates by double and even triple the rate of inflation this past decade. They had to because developers needed to be subsidized for the impact of their developments on the community.

In fact, without a vote of the people, the city council assessed all homeowners a $48 annual tax on each residence to pay for stormwater runoff problems because the city does not have a stormwater drainage system. The city could have also required builders to pay a stormwater impact fee (system development charge), but no, that would hurt them. Once again, the development community got preferential treatment while everyone else got screwed. With this money, nothing will be done to solve chronic flooding problems at the underpasses in Bend. And, as always, developers, some of the city’s richest citizens, won’t have to contribute a dime toward this problem, a position the Bulletin endorses wholeheartedly.

So remember, think of the rich this holiday season. The Bulletin always does. Afterall, we’re all equal in their eyes, except that some are more than equal than others.