I know some people spend their Sunday's watching football. I guess I'm the weirdo. Even when the Buffalo Bills are in a playoff game, I prefer to sit around and read the minutes of old Rush Town Board Meetings.
I haven't drawn any final conclusions from my reading yet. I still have lots more to read. But one thing is quite clear: lots of people in Rush, NY live in dreamland (at least those who speak up in meetings). I don't mean this in a bad way to disparage anyone. Dreamland is a great place to live, but in my opinion there is a benefit to being in places where things are not so perfect and change is more frequent.
You may have heard the saying:
"There is service that is Good, Fast and Cheap. You can only have two."
There is even a Venn diagram of the saying:
I came up with a parallel diagram to -- in my opinion -- illustrate the thinking displayed by residents in Rush Town Board meetings:
People love the town for the open space. It's beautiful and cheap to live there. But the value of this is increasing because more people want to live in places like Rush. This makes the values of the property go up. More services are needed to support a bigger community. This makes the cost of living increase. Unless the only people who live in Rush are going to be in an upper tax bracket, those who are not and wish to remain need to step out of "Dreamland" and get involved to realize potential options:
Non Commercial Single Family Rural Highest Taxes
Rush has taken this path for more than 50 years. The town encourages people to only build single family homes. Houses have gotten bigger and sit on bigger properties. The town provides basic services at rock bottom prices, keeping taxes down. Half the town doesn't have public water. There are no sanitary sewers. There is no industry. There are a few commercial properties, but they take up only about 2% of the land in the town. Commercial properties pay more taxes than residential or open land. With no water in some places and no sewer, there is unlikely to be any increase in commercial activity. School district taxes and the County taxes usually go up. They make up the majority of a property owner's tax bill.
BIG BUSINESS HIGH DENSISTY RURAL LOWEST TAXES
This is the nightmare that makes people flock to Town Board meetings. The idea that large commercial "anything" could move into town. That solar panels could pop up on open land. That there could be a sewer system put in town that would turn Rush into something akin to neighboring Henrietta; a place with little open space left. The "pretty" part of this compromise is debatable by the eye of the beholder. It is only predicate on the town zoning laws and the Planning Board making sure that anything built is within boundaries and looks good. Few people have any trust in this process. Better just avoid any potential conflict by not changing anything. Lowers taxes isn't worth sacrificing open space.
SMALL BUSINESS Commercial MIX OF HOUSEING LOWER Taxes
Some portion of the town believes that some form of this option is possible. Its just that it isn't communicated well enough to get a majority of people behind it. The 2010 Comprehensive Plan goes into this with some detail. It talks about where to put some types of businesses and other types of housing. The plan, written in 1993 provided a vision of what possibilities were available to pursue. It has not been realized. There is a current initiative underway to revise this and update plan, but if history is any guide, it won't matter much. In order for Rush to adopt any of the changes in any plan there needs to be a much bigger buy in from more people in town. At present. it seems that only about half of the residents vote, and there are even fewer that participate in long range planning. Multi unit housing and small businesses need public water and sewer. Suggesting this to some residents touches off the "nightmare scenario" reaction described above.
In the coming weeks, I'm going to spend some more time "peeling the onion" of some of the most important issues in town. I'm hoping to provide a quick guide of what some of the important issues are and how they have progressed over the last few years.
Comments