Week in Review: Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome

If you build it, they will . . .

Week in Review

City Council, Monday, November 20

See the packet here.

Audit Notes

• The city spends 36% of its money on public safety, that is, police and fire (packet, 174). Nearly 1/5 of the budget is spent on furnishing the city bureaucracy.

Workforce Dwelling Units

The land to be used for the duplex workforce dwelling units, we learned, is currently owned by the city’s “Economic Development Corporation,” the EDC, which purports to provide “certain programs to alleviate and prevent conditions of unemployment, to assist and retain local industries and commercial enterprises, and to strengthen and revitalize the City's economy.” See highlights from the council’s discussion about the corporate tax break below:

• Stockford seemed skeptical but couldn’t say no: “It is a little frustrating that they’re duplexes. When the conversation did start, it was all about single family homes.”

• Sharp said some words that he heard once: “We have a housing shortage in Hillsdale—very bad. We are to the point now where restaurants can’t stay open because they can’t find people to work there. . . We need to offer something for people to live in. I’m definitely in support of this.”

• Vear wanted to assist corporate efforts: “You have somebody willing to do some work, and build some houses, and create some taxes.”

• In a moment that called to mind Karen’s adherence to the sacred script of the Michigan Library Trustee Manual, City Manager Mackie appealed to the infallible “Master Plan”: “I just want to make clear that this particular parcel has always been looked at for duplexes.¹ We have pretty old housing stock. . . This is how we get a different level of housing into the community, through these types of programs. Duplexes do tend to have a market in Hillsdale.”

Paladino suggested trying to negotiate the PILOT rate or the agreement length with the developers, but according to city officials, 10% is “standard practice,” meaning it is beyond question. . . ? The motion passed 8-1, all in favor except Paladino.

Councilman Paladino on the Hidden Meadows PILOT

As noted above, in an 8-1 vote on November 20th, following the recommendation of the city’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC), City Council adopted a resolution granting Allen Edwin Homes a 15-year PILOT tax-exemption for duplex rentals it plans to build at 440 & 450 Hidden Meadows Drive.² Councilman Joshua Paladino has provided the Review with a brief statement of his argument against the resolution, which we post below.

I would like to express several objections to this resolution.

The first is related to beauty. The planned duplexes do not match the city’s historical architecture. This follows a trend in which City Council watches and subsidizes as beautiful old homes are torn down (often for good reason) and replaced by condominiums, duplexes, and other ugly buildings that structurally preclude single-family home ownership. The PILOT ordinance directs the council to consider whether qualifying housing will “facilitate the provision of attractive, viable housing units.” “Workforce housing units” are not homes; they are units that provide “housing amenities” for workers. Duplexes, by something like a law of beauty, rarely qualify as attractive.

The second is concerned with the purpose of the government and its obligation to its citizens. The City Council and City staff’s primary concern ought to be the protection of the life, liberty, and property of Hillsdale’s citizens. The resolution violates the principle by creating a two-tier taxation system: one for homeowners and individual landlords, and another for corporations. In approving this resolution, the City Council will have not only violated its obligation to taxpaying citizens, it will have reversed its natural obligations by preferring non-residents to residents.

The third considers the cost of procuring city services. Can we afford PILOT handouts when our current tax revenues do not even cover public safety, let alone public services? Will the costs stemming from this development be borne by the city’s current residents? New residents may yield long-term benefits, but doesn’t the existence of Special Assessments confirm what we all know to be true—that even 100% of the ad valorem tax rate does not pay for city services? If we approve this tax structure, we will once again affirm this Council’s preferred tax policy: tax breaks for corporations, tax extortion for residents.

The fourth involves the objectives of this Council. By passing the PILOT ordinance in July, the City Council affirmed its desire for an increase in “available workforce housing units” as a means to expand the population of the City. I do not share this desire. I want “family housing.” I want City Council to prefer and facilitate the competence of its citizens. I want City Council to help create, as far as possible, a city of independent homeowners who are not beholden to either banks or landlords. If Allen Edwin Homes plans to build single-family homes and sell them to citizens, let them do so. But this council should not subsidize rentals.

In sum, there is no compelling reason to subsidize new outside development when our current infrastructure languishes, when we have vacant homes, and when we have vacant downtown buildings. Instead, let us improve our city services, increase the quality of life in Hillsdale, and care for today’s citizens before we encourage unfunded additions to the city’s housing and infrastructure.

—Councilman Joshua Paladino

LifeWays: Mental Health as Left-Wing Patronage

LifeWays is a “mental health improvement” organization operating in Hillsdale and Jackson counties. In 2018, both counties passed “nonpartisan” property tax millages—Hillsdale County was 54% in favor—to give the agency additional funding, which it was ostensibly to use for the purposes of providing “mental health services” to the jail inmates of the two counties.³ For better or for worse, this has apparently happened only sporadically. Despite LifeWays’ failure to hold up their end of the bargain, the deal is to last until 2028, when the organization will return to Hillsdale County voters to beg for more money for things they may or may not provide.

But who opposes health, and who would say No to it? Perhaps some details are in order. According to LifeWays’ latest annual financial report, the company pulled in over $103 million in 2022, mostly from the public coffers, including $2.2 million from local property tax millages.

If they don’t provide the ‘services’ that they promised, what exactly does LifeWays do with all that money? you might be asking. The big expense line item, as you can see above, is labeled unhelpfully as “provider services.” After a bit of investigation, however, one finds that LifeWays redistributes public funds to address things such as LGBTQ+ “mental health challenges.”

They also use their cash to help combat one of Hillsdale County’s most pressing problems: Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.⁴

If you’re wondering how such an organization got onto the ballot as a “nonpartisan” issue, look no further than the county’s Board of Commissioners, who, like the council, routinely speak of the poverty of their political entity and yet encourage or allow any number of frivolous expenditures. In any case, if LifeWays is indeed failing to keep its word, then perhaps our board of commissioners should look into ending a deal not in the interest of Hillsdale County.

Upcoming Events

• Tuesday, November 28, 9:00 am: Hillsdale County Board of Commissioners.

• Saturday, December 2: Downtown Hillsdale’s Light-Up Parade and “Christmas at the Poorhouse.”

• Thursday, December 7: Glei’s Orchards and Greenhouses is going up for auction.

External Links

• “Strangely enough, the roots of American exceptionalism may be most discernible in ‘the square old world’ of the Midwest.” Leslie Lenkowsky.

• “Why can’t they see that the United States is fighting just such a war against Russia in Ukraine? And they’re fighting it on the cheap. It’s just like Sparta used the Sicilians as proxies to cripple the old enemy Athens by 413 B.C.” Professor Paul Rahe encourges the foreign policy establishment to provide Ukraine with “all the means” to bleed Russia.

• “Too many conservatives, on both the New Right and the mainstream Right, remain afraid to call the modern civil rights regime anti-white. The logic seems to be that if you are anti-anti-white, then you will soon be pro-white, which is how we ended up with Auschwitz.” Professor David Azerrad.

• “Hillsdale really holds itself out there as a beacon of Christian values. From our perspective, it’s not living up to those values. It’s not actually walking the walk.” Annika “Changemaker” Martin, the lawfare specialist behind the current suit against Hillsdale College, spoke with with FOX-47.

• “Donald Trump is just a bystander in comparison to those, that sort of blob — a homogenizing impulse that fundamentally believes nothing, and is not willing to take any risks or any chances.” Peter Meijer.

• “The legal possibility of abortion trains women and men to swat away the female experience of being in media res, already committed, already loving, already nourishing whether she would or no, and to take on an imitation of prototypically male anxieties . . . Ultimately, abortion works its sexist logic, not merely in its practical application as a way for women to avoid children and thus compete within an industrial work-force, but in that it forces women to transition to a male form of subjectivity.” Mark Barnes.

• “Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, was stabbed by another inmate and seriously injured Friday at a federal prison in Arizona.” Associated Press.

• “So far, drones generally rely on human operators to carry out lethal missions, but software is being developed that soon will allow them to select targets more on their own.” New York Times.

• “We know that Elagabalus identified as a woman and was explicit about which pronouns to use, which shows that pronouns are not a new thing.” TIME.

• “Since this point is carefully and consistently ignored by my attackers, let me repeat it to Linker (and Continetti) as bluntly as I can: if a post-constitutional America arrives—whether managerial, Caesarist, tyrannical, tribal, or whatever—it will be, in very large degree, your fault.” Michael Anton.

• “Because the founding era was not itself originalist, at least not in anything like the modern sense, the highest version of originalist fidelity is not to be an originalist.” Adrian Vermeule.

• “A final point—and here I find myself in frank disagreement with the final synodal report—has to do with the development of moral teaching in regard to sex. The suggestion is made that advances in our scientific understanding will require a rethinking of our sexual teaching, whose categories are, apparently, inadequate to describe the complexities of human sexuality.” Bishop Robert Barron.

• “Kirk’s conservatism was the conservatism of loss—not of rout or retreat, and certainly not despair, but a conservatism that treasures what is gone as well as what we have. Our civilization of love, the age of chivalry, is dead. Yet the dead are with us still.” Daniel McCarthy on The Conservative Mind.

1. Such “clarity” should have been offered when the project was introduced last summer as a single family housing plan. But he knows this of course.

2. Text of the Hillsdale Workforce Housing PILOT Ordinance can be viewed in the packet from the July 17th meeting of the City Council, pg. 57.

3. Meanwhile, this money could have been used to expand the over-stuffed jail.

4. Again, we say, meth and fentanyl flood into Hillsdale County via Jackson from the southern border, and our vanity organizations concern themselves with the latest academic fashions.