Week in Review
Budget Review, part 1
For our own sanity, we will look this week at the “General Fund” only, and return to some other parts of the budget, such as the various street funds, some other time. According to the budget document the General Fund gets its revenue from:
property taxes, state revenue sharing, payments in lieu of taxes, grants and donations, and a variety of miscellaneous revenues. . . Approximately thirty-seven percent (37%) of all General Fund’s revenue comes from property taxes. The budget reflects a five percent (5.00%) increase in projected property tax revenue.
The General Fund is used to pay for all city services not covered by other specific funds, including:
The City and the Hillsdale Board of Public Utilities [including the City Council, which is given a meager $23,600 out of the General Fund’s $5 million+ budget.]
The City Manager/BPU Director
Human Resources
Engineering
Finance
Technical Services
It is also used to cover gaps in the funding of other services, seemingly arbitrarily chosen. Other departments receiving money from the general fund include Dial-a-Ride, recreation, the airport’s operating expenditures, and fire department vehicles.
Additional details below:
The General Fund has been allotted $5,297,328 for the upcoming fiscal year, an increase of 2% (~$290,000 increase).
See below the departments drawing funding from the General Fund with the largest spending increases:
Public Services: 12.43% budget increase, just over $50,000.
The city’s second largest General Fund department, Public Services exists for the sake of infrastructure, snow plowing, blasting the roads with snow-melting poison, and contracting out certain tasks such as “engineering, lawn maintenance, compost site maintenance (brush grinding), City Hall cleaning, maintenance, and library maintenance.”
Within public services falls the “Parking Lots” category. The city appears to desire more and better parking lots given the 144.25% budget increase. The city plans to spend as much on parking lots in the coming year as it spent from 2019-2022. We can approve of this only if the money will be spent on planting shrubs large trees to hide and shade the parking lots.
Planning and Zoning: 100% budget increase
Alan Beeker, an “MSU Certified Zoning Administrator,” plans to dedicate a newly allotted $100,000 to “code enforcement,” for which zero dollars appear to have been spent from 2018-2021.
Economic Development: 10.68% budget increase
Staffed by Sam Fry, Beeker, and Mackie, the Economic Development fund gives city loans to favored business partners, in particular the upscale “Three Meadows Subdivision,” the forthcoming Meijer grocery store, and the Keefer House Hotel.1 Consequential political decisions seem to be made by this group.
The Police Department: 10.96% budget increase, $200,000.
The Police Department hired a “School Resource Officer” for the Hillsdale Community Schools.
Departments drawing funding from the General Fund with notable spending decreases:
Administrative Services: (23.86)%
Finance Department: (38.35)%
Building and Grounds: (23.09)%
Human Resources: (53.25)%
Public Safety Committee Meeting, May 23
The Public Safety Committee, as expected, replaced the misdemeanor language in its recent no-camping on public lands ordinance proposal with “civil infraction.” Many on the council have expressed a willingness to support the revised measure.
On this topic, some on Facebook—the political forum of choice for the very small but very active minority that is Hillsdale’s far left—have argued that Hillsdale should be made to be more like New York City, which is currently considering the adoption of a “Homeless Bill of Rights.” These same leftists who long to transform Hillsdale into an urban wasteland, wherein they wrongly imagine they might be more honorable and successful, disingenuously present themselves in public as the voice of the people against the nasty college and its elites, as in the library dispute. But the vastly overstated “Town and Gown” divide2 is a contrived concept meant to obscure the real partisan lines and avoid the question of who we are by smuggling in an Ivy-League-approved answer. The true opposition is between people who wish to take care of their own affairs here in Hillsdale (a strong majority in this county, many of whom—but by no means all, or even most—are associated with Hillsdale College) and the small cohort of tattletales who were picked last in schoolyard baseball games (at least a few of whom are associated with Hillsdale College). And so these few go to the Michigan bureaucracy or the media with the juice, just as they squealed to their teachers at age nine. They don their flannels—a shirt style to which local bureaucrats lay exclusive claim—while sneaking the state experts in the back door with their grants and their officiousness.
Upcoming Events
Today, May 25, 1:30 PM: Join the American First! Hillsdale Republicans in court at the county courthouse as our bastions of civil discourse—Leininger, Swan,3 and company—continue to wage lawfare on their partisan foes, Jon Smith, David Mosby, and Josh Gritzmaker.
June 5: City Council meeting. Presumably the council will, among other things:
come to a decision on the revised no camping ordinance;
attempt to fill the fifth and final library board seat.
External Links
New Jersey Democrats are attempting to ban the “banning” of books. Trigger warning: if you click the link, you will find yourself reading excerpts from the literature of the American Library Association.
Last night on Twitter, in the company of Elon Musk and David Sacks, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced that he is running for president and called for “replacing the woke mind virus with reality.” Shall we join Abe Dane and Penny Swan in endorsing #DeSantis2024?
If you are going to read one article on the National Conservatism conference that took place in London last week, let it be Titus Techera’s.
Writing at National Review, Graham Hillard, whose wife and children were present at The Covenant School in Nashville as Audrey Hale was murdering three children and three adults, introduces two interesting facts into the record: first, that “at some point during her spree, Hale went from the school to the (attached) neo-Gothic cathedral and fired seven bullets into a stained-glass figure of Adam”; second, that the “city-employed counselors” who ministered to parents during the crisis “wore rainbow-flag lanyards.”
Writing at American Reformer, Colin Redemer suggests that the “dangerously shallow understanding of ancient authors” on display in the apologetic work of the likes of the CLT’s Jeremy Wayne Tate can only serve the interests of the “ruling ideology of the current American regime.” Redemer would revive instead the classicism of the early American west, where the King James Bible and Shakespeare held sway, and where Plato was accessible only to a select few.4 While reading his essays, we were reminded of the excellent series of reviews — by Stanley Fish, Allen Barra, and Peter Lawler, among others — that followed the release of the Coen Brothers’ True Grit. We offer the following sentence from Barra’s review to inspire you to click the links above: “One of the best things about True Grit is that all of it is written in that vernacular, the speech of people who, while they may have been illiterate, were raised on readings of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, an English practically devoid of contractions and Latinate words.”
While we’re on the subject, Matthew Freeman, the man whose attack on Jessica Hooten Wilson launched some number of ships, has penned a new essay in The American Conservative in which he argues that “the task of classical Christian education is to train a noble class within our own institutions, so that they can supplant the class currently turning America into a dump.”
Paul Kingsnorth, writing at UnHerd: “We are on the verge of a revolution now, and it may make the Enlightenment look like a tea party. The entire basis of reality is being rewritten, or so we tell ourselves. Whole generations are growing up with a closer relationship to screen-based abstraction than to manual work or to the natural world. They have been convinced that the world is our playground, and that everything from history to human nature to sexual dimorphism can be changed at will.”
A number of homosexual writers are attempting to distance themselves from the “queer social justice activists” who have taken over the “gay rights movement” since Obergefell was decided in 2015. Writing at his Substack, Andrew Sullivan worries that the new “gender Robespierre’s” are eagerly “transing gay children,” and betraying the quest for equality and dignity that animated the “survivors” of the “AIDS epidemic.” For more of the same, see David Allen, Ben Appel, and James Kirchik.
The Catholic intelligentsia is doing battle over baseball’s adoption of the pitch clock. Here is The Pillar’s Ed Condon reviling the change for it’s introduction of “something external and arbitrary into the game,” and here is Gregory Hillis arguing that the pitch clock has “brought baseball back to itself.”
The Keefer House’s funding seems to be a lengthy story in itself. Councilman Gary Wolfram’s wife, Mary Wolfram, is apparently one of the main drivers behind this rather expensive and so far unsuccessful project.
This is especially strange given Hillsdale College’s nearly 180-year legacy. Though we think it fair to say that neither Hillsdale College nor the City of Hillsdale would be particularly worthy without the other, we do not respect the attempts to draw a line between the two as if they are neatly divisible.
For all her civility and dedication to pure, hard facts, Swan has both wildly speculated as to our identities while calling us mean names on Facebook!
We must add, however, that we would consider his argument that “Christians should not teach Plato to children” — if made by anyone else — to be fighting words. Redemer will be debating the question of “diversity” or “representation” in the classical education movement with the CLT’s Jeremy Tate on a podcast to be recorded Friday.