Yesterday, The Sun published the results of a poll it ran asking the usual question, the one that begins with, “If the election were held today…”
At best, these are baseline results, meaning that they are before any of the candidates is really campaigning, certainly not full-on they way they’ll be running around beginning in January and increasingly so the closer we get to April.
Is spending $4 million for a new water taxi terminal really the best use of those funds in a city where 25% of the people live in poverty?
This is the second in our series of posts about TIFs. A TIF – if you remember from our piece entitled “To TIF or Not To TIF?” which became an instant classic – stands for Tax Increment Financing.
Don’t you just love pie charts? Actually, it’s the pie part that I like most. Cherry pie, the kind with crisscrossed strips of crust. Chocolate pecan pie. …Unfortunately, holiday season or not, that’s not the kind of pie we’re talking about, is it?
If you’ve read this morning’s Sun, you’ve seen the article entitled, “Mayor offers plan to provide $2,500 annual tax credit to city police, firefighters, sheriff’s deputies.”
It is the mission of Baltimore Rising to start a fire. We talk about it all the time. Not the destructive kind. No. Of course not. What we’re talking about is igniting all-inclusive economic growth that will, sooner rather than later, clean up the mess that Baltimore has become over the past 60 years. Those are the 60 years during which the manufacturing sector of the city collapsed and, for one reason or another, one third of our population, mostly from the top down, disappeared. A good many of them abandoned the city for the safer, more prosperous, better educated suburbs.
Screenshot from the Baltimore Development Corporation website. Note the BDC’s slogan. Catchy, but what exactly does it mean?
Let’s talk briefly about TIFs. “To TIF or not to TIF?” isn’t really the question, but it makes for a catchy title. The real question isn’t whether or not, but where.
“Excuse me.”
Yes?
“What’s a TIF?”
If you don’t vote, this post is directed right at you. Last election, you were either too busy doing something you thought was more important, too lazy or you made the conscious decision that it wouldn’t make any difference. Maybe you didn’t like any of the candidates who were running, so why bother? Whatever your reason, you were a no show.
Baltimore Rising in favor of online voting. Why? It’s simple. Because we believe in majority rule.
Let’s just focus on two recent Baltimore City primaries. We’ll talk about primaries because, in Baltimore City, Democrats so outnumber Republicans that the winners of the Democratic primary are almost always victorious in the general election.
It’s a reasonable question.
Sure, you care about Baltimore and maybe that’s reason enough for you to contribute to Baltimore Rising. But then, human nature being what it is, you may be asking yourself, “So how, exactly, will contributing to Baltimore Rising make my life any better? What do I stand to gain if and when Baltimore Rising succeeds?”