- By Hugh Bahar
- Opinions
Print 
Letters to the EditorI cannot express in words how defeated I feel every time I open up the paper and read about a new project in Lansing that is going to increase my taxes. Just for once, I’d like to hear about a project that is fully funded by a grant or by some billionaire philanthropist. Instead, every group that can print a yard sign or get a non-profit designation feels they have the right to attack my income with yet another tax. Here are a few words for those of you supporting a charter for the Lansing Community Library Center: I appreciate your efforts and all the time you have donated, but keep out of my wallet. I like my money; it represents reimbursement for the years and years of my life that I have invested at college and at work. I like spending it on myself and my family, and I don’t want to give it to yet another taxpayer-funded bureaucracy.
If you vote yes for this library, it will become a permanent part of the Lansing School tax base FOREVER. It means that the library is guaranteed to get their money every year, and the taxpayers will have NO say in that fact. The only exceptions to that are if the library wants more money the voters will have to approve it; or if the community gets enough petition signatures and votes to decouple the library from the school taxes.
Voting for this library establishes yet another ever-expanding bureaucracy that we have to fund. Sure, it’s only $25 a year in 2007, but every couple of years they will come back to us and say “only $25 more a year…the cost of a single book”. This will continue until your annual tax bill for the library amounts to several books per year.
There are at least 40 libraries in Tompkins County. Our tax dollars support dozens of these. We don’t need a library here in Lansing that competes with the schools for our education dollar.
From: Hugh Bahar
Lansing NY
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