State Parks Eroding

Tax Reform (4.00 / 3)

This trend will continue until we have more people who run for office willing to talk seriously about the need for tax reform in our state.  We are indeed "penny-wise and pound foolish," as you say -- in our politics as well as our budgeting.  

We need visionaries who will run for office who will say that there are better ways to raise revenue than relying on the property tax system and a patchwork of regressive and unreliable revenue streams.  

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by: Rep. Jim Splaine @ Sat Aug 29, 2009 at 06:51:35 AM CDT

What an awesome idea Gov. Gregg had (4.00 / 1)

back in the day.

And so befitting his gubernatorial portrait, standing astride one of our beautiful mountains.

Let's start privately funding police and roads too.  Let's just take GOP free market radicalism to its end point - survival of the fittest.  Who needs civilization, anyway?

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by: Dean Barker @ Sat Aug 29, 2009 at 08:04:46 AM CDT

Poor Stewardship (0.00 / 0)

Many humans have proven poor stewards of the land.  Some people thought that private ownership would make people more responsible (Tragedy of the Commons), but that's not been born out by experience.  After all, the nation is littered with abandoned industrial, commercial, agricultural and residential sites where no maintenance is being provided.  The early settlers in New England probably thought that the cleared fields and open woodlands were provided for their comfort by the good Lord.  That the inhabitants who had provided stewardship had been killed off by germs for which they were not prepared didn't occur to most of them.

I was surprised to read that the seminal article which supported private ownership was published as late as 1968.

Anyway, there's a whole generation that thinks tending fields and forests and streams is contrary to their environmental ethic that just wants everything to be left alone and take care of itself.  Mainly, I'd say, it's because they're lazy and concerned with appearances, spreading fertilizers and poisons in turn on their laws and letting the chemicals run off into the lakes and streams.  Then they're surprised when there are no fish to eat the mosquitos and the frogs are missing legs.

There are no pristine lands in New Hampshire.  When the last glacier left it scraped the bedrock bare and every bit of organic life came after, immigrant seeds arriving on the currents of the air.
So, I guess what I'm saying is that the environmental "do nothing" ethic is also responsible.  It's not just people who think the mountains should be pretty to look at from their chalets and empty of the hoi poloi.

Being a good steward of the land is hard work.  But, not everybody has to do it.  Having invented money, we can buy our way out of getting our hands dirty and our muscles sore--just as most of us get out of actually going to war.  Not working and not paying is where the problem lies.  It's not virtuous to just order people about, as Judd Gregg would like.  

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by: hannah @ Sat Aug 29, 2009 at 09:31:46 AM CDT

the market has no mechanism to chargeback adequately for these services (0.00 / 0)

I just took a look at the DES fees. A major wetlands fill permit is 20 cents / square foot, which amounts to $4000 for a 20,000 square foot fill (about half an acre).  I wonder if that even covers DES staff time. Fills bigger than an acre are rare, but fill size doesn't really measure the impact to most wetlands, because most fills are carefully designed road crossings at the narrowest points, and the cumulative effect is a total fragmentation of a wetlands habitat.

The tragedy of the commons is real, and it is played out here in slightly altered form. The land is privately owned, but no one owns the wildlife. No one owns the groundwater filtration mechanisms the wetland provides. No one owns the soul-purifying effects of that picturesque forest we drive by every day.

And when those things disappear, we have no way to charge for their disappearance. What's the actual cost to the community of the disappearance of 20,000 square feet groundwater filtration, the creation of an additional load of pavement that requires more filtering, and the disappearance of 100 acres of wildlife habitat surrounding that wetland?

My guess is that it is well over a one-time fee of $4000, even if you pro-rate it by the total value of all the acres that currently provide that service in, say, Rockingham county. Multiplying $4000 by a factor of 10 would still not even come close, and if there are no wetlands involved, just cutting trees and paving involves only a $25 timber activities fee, and possibly a timber tax.

I'm not suggesting this as an actual market-based solution (although I do think the DES fees should go up at least somewhat). Market-based or not, it would be an anti-development approach, and even I have some concerns about the economic impact it might have. But if you want a market-based solution to parks and wild areas, this is cost that should have been charged back.

(You could also reverse the argument and suggest we should be paying farm and forest owners for the services they now provide for free...)

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by: kite @ Sat Aug 29, 2009 at 10:03:03 AM CDT

Can we tax the birds and the bears? (0.00 / 0)

Just the out-of-state visitors, of course.

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by: elwood @ Sat Aug 29, 2009 at 17:45:08 PM CDT